How to use the ping test
Choose how many pings to send (50 is a good balance) and press Start. Each ping is a tiny request to the nearest Cloudflare data center; the bar chart fills in as the replies come back. Taller bars are slower pings, and gaps are pings that never came back.
The main figure is the median ping: half the pings were faster and half slower. It is a better summary than the average because a single spike can pull the average up. To find out how much the time varies, look at jitter and the highest value.
How ping, jitter and packet loss are measured
Jitter = average of |ping(n) − ping(n−1)|
Each ping's time comes from your browser's Resource Timing data: the moment the request was sent to the moment the first byte of the answer arrived. That excludes time the browser spends on its own housekeeping, so the figure is close to the network round trip. The first ping opens the connection and isn't counted.
Worked example: pings of 18, 22, 19 and 31 ms change by 4, 3 and 12 ms, so the jitter is (4 + 3 + 12) ÷ 3 = 6.3 ms. The median of the four pings is 20.5 ms.
A ping that gets no answer within 2 seconds is counted as lost. Packet loss is the share of lost pings. Note that web browsers can't send the low-level ICMP "ping" used by the command line, so this test uses tiny HTTPS requests instead. The results are very close, and they reflect the traffic you actually use.
What is a good ping?
| Ping | Rating | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 ms | Excellent | Instant. Ideal for competitive shooters and cloud gaming |
| 20–50 ms | Good | Responsive gaming and natural conversation on calls |
| 50–100 ms | Fair | Fine for most uses; fast games feel a little behind |
| Over 100 ms | Poor | Noticeable lag in games; people talk over each other on calls |
Jitter under 10 ms and packet loss of 0% are ideal. Above 30 ms of jitter or 1% of loss, calls and games start to suffer.
How to lower your ping
- Use Ethernet. Wi-Fi adds a few milliseconds and, more importantly, spikes and jitter.
- Stop background uploads. Cloud backups and uploads fill the line and can raise ping by hundreds of milliseconds (bufferbloat). Smart Queue Management (SQM) in the router fixes this.
- Choose nearby game servers. Distance sets a floor: light in fiber needs about 1 ms for every 100 km of round trip.
- Check the technology. Fiber usually has the lowest ping, then cable and DSL; 4G/5G vary, and geostationary satellite adds 500+ ms.
Frequently asked questions
What is ping in an internet speed test?
Ping, or latency, is the time a small message takes to travel from your device to a server and back, in milliseconds. Lower is better. It doesn't depend much on your plan's speed: a 50 Mbps fiber line can have a lower ping than a 500 Mbps cable line.
What is a good ping for gaming?
Under 20 ms is excellent and under 50 ms is good for almost every game. Between 50 and 100 ms is playable for most games but noticeable in fast shooters. Above 100 ms, you'll see lag.
What is jitter?
Jitter is how much your ping changes from one moment to the next. Steady 40 ms pings are better for a video call than pings that jump between 10 and 90 ms. Jitter under 10 ms is good; above 30 ms, calls become choppy.
What causes packet loss?
Weak Wi-Fi, faulty cables, an overloaded router or congestion at the provider. Even 1–2% loss can cause freezes in calls and rubber-banding in games. Test with a cable to see whether Wi-Fi is the cause.
Why is this ping different from the one in my game?
Your game measures the time to its own server, which may be in another city or country. This test measures the time to the nearest Cloudflare data center, which shows the quality of your own line.
Ping is measured with HTTPS requests from your browser to the nearest Cloudflare data center. Times to game servers and other sites depend on their location.