Web site speed test sites
Posted: 16 November 2009 / Tags: download rate, speed test, sussexdigital, web site optimisation
Your visitors spend around 5 seconds on your web site to figure out whether it’s for them. If they visit your site, you want to make sure they are not waiting for pages to load.
Web site speed test sites are useful as they help measure the download size, as well as simulating the time users have to wait for web pages to download on various internet connections. Remember, depending on where your users are, they may not always be on broadband connections, check your web analytics to be sure before using large images or rich media like video.
How it works
The tests loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.
Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The services then calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.
The iWeb service goes one step further by offering advice on how to improve page load time. The service incorporates the current best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.
Top three speedtest web sites
Screenshot showing speed test report from Pingdom.com