7 Awesome Tools to Test Website Load Time

A crucial part of managing a website or blog is to make sure that it loads quickly. Did you know that the average Internet user waits 5-10 seconds at max for a page to load? If your page fails to load in this time, you lost a potential visitor, reader, or customer. Sometimes having extra plugins, addons, or scripts running in the background will drastically reduce the time it takes your site to load. But it can be hard finding the culprits. So we put together a list of tools to test your web site’s load time for better optimization.

1. Pingdom

Pingdom is one of the leading tools on the market that allows you to monitor website up-time and test it’s performance. It tests complete HTML pages and all objects including, images, CSS, JS, RSS, flash, and frames. It also tries to mimic the way your page load sin a browser. The best part about

this tool is you can view a full list of these objects to try and pinpoint which ones are loading normal and which are slowing your page down. It is by far the most robust option for testing your website or blog. But it can come at a cost.

They offer several pricing options ranging from a Business package to a Basic package. Each one comes with a free trial. However, if you just want to try it out, their free account plan limits you to one website with full features.

2. Host-tracker

Host-tracker is free to use. It only takes 2 minutes or less to test your site. Once completed, you will see everage page size, response time, rate of transfer in kb/sec, as well as location and IP that is testing your site. Although it doesn’t offer the details like Pingdom, you can quickly test the average load time from different servers from around the world.

3. WebSiteOptimization

WebSiteOptimization is another free service that does a decent job at providing page download speed, sizes of page downloads (to help locate an issue), and even gives page objects like images and scripts. This can help diagnose slow load speed so you can pin-point what is causing issues.

In addition to the expected features of a free service like this, it also offers Analysis and Recommendations for fixing problems.

4. Website Speed test from Iwebtool

Iwebtool offers a free application that tests website speed. You can enter multiple domains to test all at once with this tool. It is very minmalistic as it only details the size, loadtime, and average speed it took to load the page.

5. Webslug

Webslug allows you to compare two sites side by side which can be useful at times. It just gives you load time but it compares it to a databse of every website tested so that you can see how your website compares. This is good if your not sure if your website is loading at par with other websites.

6. Site-Perf.com

Siteperformance is the closest tool to Pingdom but free. It allows you to test load times from different browsers, gives all of the load times the other tools give, plus it allows you to see a detail description of all your links and scripts so you can throughly review your entire website structure. It is very similar to Pingdom but absolutely free.

7. Webwait

Webwait is just another great tool to just test load time.

If you have a tool you would like to share, leave a comment or email me at nate@onebiginternet.com

Photo by: Nathan Eal