Do You Know How Fast Your Page Loads?
Have you ever wondered how long your visitors wait for your blog to load? Or how long would they wait? How long would you wait?
In this article we'll review a few online, free tools that can help you determine which areas of your blog take the most time to load and ways to help improve your load time!
Performance Monitoring Tools
First up is StopWatch by Numion. This tool acts like a timer and starts when your browser begins to open the site address (the URL you enter) and then stops when "Done" appears in the browser's Status Bar. It does include resolving all HTML, images, JavaScripts, however does not handle content handled by plugins. Please note that addresses stored in cache will measure faster. In the end, it simply reports how long the page took to load.
Next, lets review Pingdom Tools. Pingdom tools is more thorough in that in measures all objects of your site and shows the load time in a status bar format, as well as the totals on the overall load time, number of objects, images, scripts, plugins, CSS, and much more! With these results and the status bar formatting of all objects, you can visually see areas that may be slowing your load time.
Last but not least, you can use Uptrends.com Web Performance Monitoring. This application acts very much like Pingdom Tools with the status bar like report and the totaling of the number of images, stylesheets and scripts, but also reports the largest object and the slowest object, which I found very helpful. With that knowledge I found I could remove the largest object as it wasn't even being used but was taking up space and effecting my load time.
Tips to Improve Your Load Time
The banner loads first, then the left, center, then right columns. For this reason, some people use a format where the posting column is on the left, and then the two sidebars are on the right.
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