How to test Website speed in Linux/macOS Terminal

If you want to test your website's speed in different countries and locations, you can use the sites in the Website Speed Test on the page below. 

✓ Online Network Tools for Network Engineers

However, if you have a web server at the headquarters and measure the speed at a specific branch, you can simply measure it in the following way.

▶ Method 1 (with wget)

I used the /dev/null parameter since I don't need to save the file while measuring it. This way, you can only measure the speed without downloading the file.

MBPr:/Users/AnalysisMan/Downloads% wget -O /dev/null http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip

--2020-10-16 22:53:29-- http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip
Connecting to 192.168.1.110:8000... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 570572968 (544M) [application/zip]
Saving to: '/dev/null'

100%[================================================================================>] 570,572,968 5.45MB/s in 1m 46s

2020-10-16 22:55:15 (5.14 MB/s) - '/dev/null' saved [570572968/570572968]


By default, the result's speed displays as Bytes/second. You may add '--report-speed=bits' at the end of the command to get the result with Bits/second, which is generally used in the networking world.

MBPr:/Users/AnalysisMan/Downloads% wget -O /dev/null http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip --report-speed=bits

--2020-10-16 23:00:06-- http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip
Connecting to 192.168.1.110:8000... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 570572968 (544M) [application/zip]
Saving to: '/dev/null'

100%[================================================================================>] 570,572,968 46.4Mb/s in 1m 50s

2020-10-16 23:01:56 (41.5 Mb/s) - '/dev/null' saved [570572968/570572968]

▶ Method 2 (with curl)

You may use the curl command as well.

curl -o /dev/null http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip

MBPr:/Users/AnalysisMan/Downloads% curl -o /dev/null http://192.168.1.110:8000/GNS3.VM.VMware.ESXI.2.2.15.zip

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
15 544M 15 85.8M 0 0 5502k 0 0:01:41 0:00:15 0:01:26 6137k


▶ Related article: How to set up a Web Server on macOS