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How to simulate a slow internet connection for testing?

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My website loads very fast on my home computer, but this may be because I have a Verizon FIOS with a 100/100 internet plan. Even if I try to use a mobile phone, the loading speed of the site is still very fast, because my speed is four to five times the speed of 4G LTE.

Unfortunately, when I checked the loading time of the website in Google Analytics, it didn’t take me 1 or 2 seconds to load the page, but a high value like 5 or 7 or 10 seconds! Obviously, very few people browse my website over a super-high-speed broadband connection.

Simulate Slow Connection using Chrome

  • Go ahead and install Chrome if you don’t already have it installed on your system. Once you do, open a new tab and then press CTRL + SHIFT + I to open the developer tools window or click on the hamburger icon, then More Tools, and then Developer Tools.
  • This will bring up the Developer Tools window, which will probably be docked on the right side of the screen. I prefer it docked at the bottom of the screen since you can see more data. To do this, click on the three vertical dots and then click on the middle dock position.
  • Now go ahead and click on the Network tab. On the right, you should see a label called No Throttling.
  • If you click on that, you’ll get a dropdown list of pre-configured speeds that you can use to simulate a slow connection.
  • The choices range from Offline to WiFi and the numbers are shown as LatencyDownloadUpload. The slowest is GPRS followed by Regular 2G, then Good 2G, then Regular 3G, Good 3G, Regular 4G, DSL, and then WiFi. Pick one of the options and then reload the page you are on or type in another URL in the address bar.
  • If you want to use your own specific values, you can click the Add button under Custom. Click on the Add Custom Profile button to add a new profile.

When using GPRS, it took www.google.com a whopping 16 seconds to load! Overall, this is a great tool that is built right into Chrome that you can use for testing your website load time on slower connections.

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