Pop Quiz: How fast does your site load?

Under ten seconds? What about five? Does it make it there in two? One?

Don’t know? You should! A fast site should be one of your top priorities. It’s one of the easiest ways to ensure that you get more visitors and that they stick around longer. A faster site means more page views, more traffic from Google and a guarantee that every visitor you do get counts.

The speed is dependent on a few different variables including the time of day, who is looking at the site, where they are located and how good their connection is, but having a good idea of your site’s loading time is critical as it is the only way to improve it.

Here are five free tools that will help you find out how fast your site loads.

1. YSlow

YSlow is an extension for Firebug, which in turn is an extension for Firefox. Created by Yahoo!, YSlow is designed to not only tell you how long it takes to load your site, but where your issues lie and how you can improve them.

A YSlow diagnostic produces a grade on a scale of A to F and provides a breakdown across many different categories. Though not all of the rules may apply to your site (make sure that you are using the correct ruleset before running the test), if you get any F’s and they aren’t in error, you may want to take a look at the issues raised and see if you can fix them.

YSlow also has some great tools to help you minimize your loading time, such as JavaScript and image compression features.

The only drawback to YSlow is that it doesn’t give a hard estimate of time. For that, we need another tool to help us out.

2. Pingdom Full Page Test

Pingdom provides a free page test tool that can work wonders for highlighting trouble areas on your site.

The tool works by having their server pull down a copy of your Web page and then displaying in a “waterfall” diagram how long each element takes to load. This includes when the element started loading, how long it took to make the first connection, then to receive the first byte and then the time it took to finish.

This can be very useful for seeing what elements are slowing your site down and also detecting potential issues with your server, especially if the test is waiting a long time for a reply.

This test closely mimics a real browser and can provide a very accurate picture of the way your site loads to a regular end user.

3. WebsiteOptimization.com

WebsiteOptimization.com offers a very similar tool to Pingdom’s but without the fancy graph. In exchange though, you get more data than Pingdom’s including time estimates on different connections and tips similar to YSlow’s on correcting potential problems.

The drawback, however, is that it doesn’t actually test your server. It looks at the size of your files and makes estimations from there. So the numbers, while useful, are not 100% accurate either. However, they can nicely compliment Pingdom’s numbers in giving you a good “ballpark” estimate of the time it would take to load your site on different connections.

4. InternetSupervision

InternetSupervision provides a very basic check of your site’s loading time, but it does it from 9 different locations all across the globe to give you an idea of your site’s loading time from many different locations.

The limitation of this check is that it does not load all of the elements from your site, just your HTML, but this can still give you an idea of how your server and your host’s network perform when they are visited from browsers all over the globe.

In short, this is a good test to look for consistency, not necessarily an actual loading time.

5. Aptimize

Finally, Aptimize has a great site speed test that offers a breakdown similar to Pingdom, but that is much easier to read. It breaks it down by the types of content you have, as well as your server processing time, and also includes YSlow results in with their analysis.

The problem with Aptimize is that it is an attempt to sell their optimization services. You have to be emailed the results, which arrive in a PDF, and it is very marketing heavy. If this makes you uneasy, you may want to use other services instead.

Bottom Line

You need to know how fast your site is loading and where your weaknesses are so you can improve. Is your server loading pages slowly? Is it a few JavaScript files you can omit? Where are the hiccups and how can you fix them?

Once you know that, you can make the needed changes and watch as your site grows faster.

Tags:   loading • pingdom • site optimization • site speed