GTmetrix big changes arrived

Over 2 months ago I wrote about big changes coming to GTmetrix off the back of their own announcement that it was coming later that month, which was back in September.  But it’s finally here!

Yesterday GTmetrix announced on their own blog all the changes that they’d previously announced, so not too much of a surprise, other than that it’s now November.

The heart of the changes is that instead of using PageSpeed and YSlow, reports are now powered by Google’s Lighthouse.  However, they’ve added four additional custom audits, including enable Keep-Alive, combine images using CSS sprites, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and avoid CSS @import.  These go towards calculating their own custom grade.

They’ve also added some new report tabs, so they now have Summary, Performance, Structure, Waterfall, Video and History.  These break the results from Lighthouse down into different sections, rather than sticking it all on one page.

They’ve also added the PRO plans that they’d previously announced, with additional features available such as more regularly monitoring, extra daily on-demand tests and API credits, as well as a longer data retention of report history and 15 premium test locations.  There is still the free “Basic” plan, as well as 6 PRO plans – the 3 aimed at individuals are Solo, Starter (recommended) and Growth – the 3 aimed at companies are Champion (recommended), Team and Enterprise.

This is welcome news and I can’t wait for my weekly reports to come in, once they’ve had a chance to create some history with the new system.