Ping test

Ping, or latency, is the time a small message needs to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds. It is the delay you feel: between pressing a key and seeing the shot in a game, between finishing a sentence and the other person reacting on a call. Bandwidth decides how much data fits through your connection; ping decides how quickly anything starts happening.

Jitter is the variation between consecutive pings. Games and call apps can adapt to a steady delay by buffering a little, but they cannot predict sudden swings, so high jitter shows up as stutter, rubber-banding and robotic voices even when the average ping looks fine.

How to read your result

• Under 20 ms: excellent. Typical for fibre or cable close to the server.
• 20–50 ms: very good for gaming, calls and everything else.
• 50–100 ms: fine for calls and casual games, noticeable in fast shooters.
• Over 100 ms: expect delay in games and people talking over each other on calls. Normal on satellite and some mobile connections.
• Jitter: under 5 ms is very steady, under 20 ms is acceptable, above 30 ms usually means Wi-Fi interference or a congested line.

How to lower your ping

Use a cable instead of Wi-Fi, or at least move closer to the router and use the 5 GHz band. Pause big uploads, cloud backups and game downloads while you play. If ping jumps whenever someone else uses the connection, enable Smart Queue Management (SQM) on your router. Finally, pick game servers in your own region: no setting can beat the speed of light, and every 1,000 km adds roughly 10 ms of round trip.

The browser cannot send ICMP packets like the ping command, so this test times HTTP requests instead, using the same engine as our speed test:

1. One warm-up request opens the connection to our server in Ashburn, US-East, so DNS lookup, TCP and TLS setup are not counted.
2. Then 30 tiny requests run one after another, about five per second. Each is timed with the browser's Resource Timing API, from the moment the request leaves until the first byte of the answer arrives.
3. Ping is the median of all samples, which ignores the odd outlier. Jitter is the average difference between consecutive samples, the same simple definition used by LibreSpeed.

Because it runs over an open HTTP connection, the result is typically within a few milliseconds of an ICMP ping to the same place. The test itself stores nothing and sets no cookies.