Most web audiences relish fast performance times as much as they have a distaste for poor performance. Speed is king in the land of web browsers. Not only will web users often navigate away from sites that take an average of 3 seconds or longer to load, they often do something that can cause sleepless nights for marketing executives, they tell others of their experience. The following free, web-based tools can be used to measure the time it takes to load your existing website or application:
Web Site Performance Test
A real-time site performance tool displaying information on things such as DNS lookup, time and connection time.
Page Speed
Created by Google, this web-based tool evaluates the performance of web pages and gives detailed suggestions for improvement.
Website Speed Test
It provides plenty of data on page speed, including estimated load times for various types of Internet connections.
Pingdom Tools
A free online tool to test the load time and analyze a given web page from the perspective of a first time visitor. It presents you with several reports such as a breakdown of how long each web page object (e.g. images, style sheets and JavaScript libraries) takes to download and performance grades for things like browser caching.
Show Slow
Show Slow allows you to add a URL to be monitored (publicly) and regularly captures results from three popular testing tools: YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace.
Google Analytics
The Site Speed report allows you to measure the page load time across your site. It was introduced with the latest release of Google Analytics, so be sure you are using the newest version.
YSlow
A free tool created by Yahoo!’s development team. It analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
Here are some of the main contributing factors to consider when looking at performance:
Back end
- Server infrastructure
- Database
- Back end coding
Front end
- Secure Socket Layer (Most pages load slower under SSL)
- Front end coding
- External resources (images, style sheets, scripts)
Remember that a well designed, well performing website, that loads quickly is one of the best ways to improve conversions and overall customer satisfaction.
ColorCuboid as a leading web design & mobile app development company offers complete mobile web design and development solution to clients across the globe. Contact us today!
