There are many popular sites out there that let you to accurately measure your connection speed. With this information, you can troubleshoot network issues and raise complaints with your ISP if something is awry.

SpeedCheck is one of the most prominent tools on the market, but what makes it worth choosing over its competitors?

1. Ease of Use

Some connection testing tools are a bit bloated, with overcomplicated interfaces, flashy graphics, and resource-hogging features. The opposite is true of SpeedCheck, which opts for a stripped back, minimalistic design that makes it incredibly simple to get started straight away.

All you need to do to commence a test is click the big blue button in the middle of the screen and it will leap into life, assessing your download and upload speeds in under a minute and presenting the results to you in a clear, concise way.

Perhaps the most important advantage of the way that the site is designed comes from the fact that it is not cluttered with ads. Instead, it has a clean look and will not bombard you with pop-ups or promotions.

2. Analytics

Aside from the information that SpeedCheck provides at the end of a single test, it can also be a useful tool to track your connection’s performance over an extended time period.

Register with the site, create an account and come back later to re-run the test and see if anything has changed. This will let you identify any obvious trends in your connection and plot the peaks and troughs of performance over weeks, months or even years.

3. Guidance

The SpeekCheck site provides a comprehensive guide to teach you the ins and outs of internet connectivity in a clear, concise way. It demystifies some of the more confusing bits of jargon that you will encounter when comparing broadband services, as well as explaining how the test itself works so that you have a better idea of what the results mean.

Perhaps most importantly the guidance provided on the site explains what makes speed testing necessary in the first place, giving you the pointers you need to work out whether you are suffering from a sluggish connection due to your own hardware, some external fault or hidden ISP policies.

4. Flexibility

SpeedCheck isn’t just a site for desktop users, as it is also optimized for mobile devices. This means you can use it to see how quickly your provider’s coverage is working at any given time, detect outages or trial your Wi-Fi network’s speed on the fly.

Dr. Frederik Lipfert is a web developer and founder of severalcompanies in the IT field. He created SpeedCheck – a web-based toolfor measuring internet speed and performance to help users andservice providers improve their connectivity.