Can I test locally?

Hi all,

Apologies if this has been asked before but I am looking at optimising font loading strategies for my site and would like to test how long it takes for fonts to load.

I am using Live Server extension on VS-code which gives me a portnumber which I can view my test website, however when I try and use this portnumber on webpagetest it says ‘You can not test 127.0.0.1 from the public Internet. Your web site needs to be hosted on the public Internet for testing’.

Is there a quickway around this? Someone suggested I spin up a webserver with nodejs and test from that? Is this the best strategy for creating an eviroment where I could quickly make changes and test them,

Many thanks

Are you running your own WebPageTest locally as well or are you trying to use the public agents to test 127.0.0.1?

If you are running your own instance locally you can enable the “allowPrivate” setting which should allow it: webpagetest/settings.ini.sample at master · WPO-Foundation/webpagetest · GitHub (if not, a code update to include localhost in the private setting is easy enough).

If you are trying to use the public agents to test your localhost server it’s not going to work without exposing your test site/page to the public Internet with a real IP address (or at least hostname).