Directory/Categories/Monitoring & Analytics/webpagetest

webpagetest

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

WebPageTest is one of the most popular and free tools for measuring webpage performance and enables you to run web performance tests on your site from a number of different locations across the world in a number of different browsers. Operated by Catchpoint.

Operator website ↗

GoodBot

Assessment

Monitoring & Analytics

What is webpagetest?

WebPageTest is a widely recognized industry standard for measuring web performance, originally created by Patrick Meenan and now operated by Catchpoint. It functions as a diagnostic tool that simulates real-world user interactions to provide detailed insights into page load speeds, resource bottlenecks, and rendering performance. The bot is typically triggered by users initiating a test through the WebPageTest platform to audit their own sites or analyze competitors.

Helpful — This bot is a legitimate tool used by developers and site owners to audit and improve web performance.

Identification

Bot name

webpagetest

Operator

Catchpoint

Why it crawls your site

The bot crawls websites to execute performance tests, which involve downloading page assets, measuring network latency, and recording visual metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It does not index content for search engines or scrape data for AI training; rather, it processes the data to generate a performance report for the user who requested the test. You can verify the operator by checking the User-Agent string for the 'PTST' identifier and ensuring the source IP originates from Catchpoint's known testing infrastructure.

Block or allow webpagetest

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for monitor/webpagetest in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block webpagetest from crawling your entire site
User-agent: monitor/webpagetest
Disallow: /

# Allow webpagetest full access
User-agent: monitor/webpagetest
Allow: /