Setting up an Android phone as a WebPageTest agent

Pixel 2 connected to a raspberry pi

Running detailed website performance tests is often necessary to understand how a website is experienced by an end user in order to identify opportunities for improvements.

WebPageTest.org gives us the ability to run these tests from all over the world – the public instance even gives us access to real devices, so we can check how a site works across different browsers on different versions of different operating systems on different real devices!

In my previous articles I explained how to easily set up your very own private, autoscaling, WebPageTest server. This private instance creates test agents in AWS, dotted around AWS regions, which can emulate a mobile browser; this uses the device emulation in Chrome to throttle network, CPU, memory, etc and change the available screen size.

While this mobile emulation is simple to set up and use, sometimes an emulator isn’t enough; device-specific edge cases, operating system limitations, and performance on a real device may need to be validated to get confidence that everything works as expected in the real world.

In this article I’ll show you how to set up an Android phone as your own WebPageTest agent to connect to your private WebPageTest server, controlled by a Raspberry Pi!

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Customized WebPageTest Lighthouse Results using a Custom Test Agent

In my recent article Eco Worriers: Saving the Planet, One Unoptimized Website at a Time for the fantastic annual Perf Planet advent calendar, I mentioned how I created a Private WebPageTest setup to use my own custom test agents, which were configured to use an extra Lighthouse plugin (The Green Web Foundation’s "greenhouse").

In this article I’ll show how to create custom WebPageTest agents, and how to configure your Private WebPageTest instance to use these instead of the default test agents.

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Automating WebPageTest using the nodejs webpagetest-api package

WebPageTest-api NodeJS

Hopefully you’ve already had a chance to play around with the amazing WebPageTest during your website performance testing adventure so far.

In case not, I have a few articles you might like to browse, to help you get up to speed using this fantastic, free, open source, website performance testing tool.

It has a website interface and also an API, which I went through in the previous article.

In this article I’ll show you how to use the incredible webpagetest-api nodejs package to make the orchestration and automation of your WebPageTest setup even easier!

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