Debugging Speed Kit
We highly recommend to use our Browser Extension to manage and analyze Speed Kit directly from your browser.
Toggling activates/deactivates Speed Kit only locally in your browser. Using the toggle is the best approach for debugging and testing.
Updating puts the origin version of this site into all caches.
Indicates whether Speed Kit is currently activated for the website.
Shows whether the site has been served by Speed Kit or the origin server.
Another option to debug Speed Kit is our Bookmarklet. Compared to the Browser Extension the Bookmarklet works in all browsers.
Open your Chrome browser and go to https://scripts.baqend.com/bookmarklet/. Copy the code into your clipboard and add a bookmark by clicking on the star icon in the URL bar. In the opened popup click on “More...”, name the bookmark, and paste the code into the URL field. Save the bookmark to complete the installation.
Open your Chrome browser and go to the site where Speed Kit is installed on. Click on your Speed Kit bookmarklet and wait until the popup appears. The popup will show some information about the current navigation and also lets you change the Speed Kit group. To switch to the Speed Kit group, type “A” into the textfield, hit “OK” and reload to install the service worker. To leave the Speed Kit group, type “B” into the text field, hit “OK” and reload to uninstall the service worker. The bookmarklet works accordingly in other browsers.
If Speed Kit is already activated (group “A”) for the selected domain in your browser, the fastest way to turn it on/off is via Chrome DevTools.
Simply open your Chrome browser and press F12 to access DevTools. Then you go to the “Application” tab and click on “Service Workers”. The “Service Workers” settings enable you to turn Speed Kit off instantly by activating the checkbox “Bypass for network”. In contrast, you can turn Speed Kit back on by deactivating the checkbox.
The Page Speed Analyzer and WebPageTest are currently the only self-testing tools that are able to measure the performance uplift of Speed Kit. Therefore, we highly recommend to only use these two tools for self-testing. In general, the most accurate performance results will be delivered by the Speed Kit real-user monitoring.
The analyzer does a side-by-side comparison of your website with and without Speed Kit. In principle, the analyzer loads your website multiple times to contrast performance with and without Speed Kit. However, it does more than what you can do with your browser.
Performance report: It gives you various metrics and even waterfall diagrams for your page load.
Optimization hints: It provides suggestions on how to improve web performance for your website.
User-centric: It measures the Speed Index and the First Meaningful Paint.
Possible speedup: It tells you how much faster your website will be, if you activate Speed Kit.
Video comparison: It captures the page load, so that you can literally see the effect that Speed Kit has.
Once you enter your website's URL, the analyzer starts two different Chrome browsers to load your website: One loads the version with Speed Kit and the other loads your website without Speed Kit. If Speed Kit is already active on your website, the analyzer deactivates Speed Kit for one of the two tests. If Speed Kit is not active on your website, the analyzer injects Speed Kit into your websites for one of the tests. Thus, you always get to know what Speed Kit currently does or could do for your web performance.
We did not implement the measurements ourselves, though. Instead, we use the open-source testing framework WebPageTest. You can access the WebPageTest Waterfalls by clicking “Show Details” below the video comparison and then clicking one of the links at the bottom of the overview (either “Without Speed Kit” or “With Speed Kit”, depending on the test run you are interested in).
By default, the analyzer simulates a desktop user located in Germany. However, you can change the default behavior through several parameters:
Mobile: Whether or not the website should be loaded from a mobile browser (true) or a desktop browser (false, default).
Run from US: Whether or not the website should be loaded from the United States (true) or from Germany (false, default).
Activity timeout: The time after the last network activity before a test is considered complete.
Speed Kit config: The detailed config parameters for Speed Kit to allow you performance fine-tuning (see Speed Kit API docs).
