Gone are the days of the dialup modem
I shudder to think of the time I wasted waiting for files to download on my 56k modem. It makes me laugh to think how excited I got when I had ISDN installed...ok hands up, I'm a geek! Actually the modem doesn't seem to have gone away at all. Whilst digging around the analytics for one our sites, I was surprised to see that 15.1% of its traffic is dialup.
What happened to the 100kb rule?
Back in the day we used to have a 100kb rule (best practice). No page including its images, CSS and JavaScript files should be any greater than 100k. Of course there was a small amount of flexibility! So why is this no longer adhered to?
- Most of us in the development community have had broadband for many years now so don't notice the download speed of our fancy websites, with their heavy laden JavaScript libraries and images.
- Cheap hosting companies have also been a contributing factor to our bloated sites, with their offers of unlimited disc space and bandwidth
- Lastly I think we have neglected passing on these best practices to new developers and web designers that join our community.
As web developers we need to take a step back and start optimising our sites for download speed again.
Three reasons why you should take your website's loading speed seriously
If you're not worried about the time it takes your visitors to download your site, then you might want to have a rethink! Here are just three reasons that why:
- If you're not careful, download speeds could start to affect a website's search engine rankings. Matt Cutts, a Google employee has indicated that it could soon be a ranking factor.
- Nearly every new mobile phone produced has a built in Internet browser. Unless you are in a town or city, 3G isn't available and we all know how painful GPRS is.
- According to Akamai, visitors will hit the back button if your site hasn't loaded with 4 seconds. This one on its own is enough!
How to check a website's load speed
There are lots of online tools available to help you check a website's speed. Most of them do the same checks, giving you reports on time to download the entire page and size of the files/objects downloaded. But if you are going to fix your website you will need a bit more information.
- Overall page size including all objects: images, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.
- Load speed from different locations
- Compression ratio for page and each of the objects
- The order and time taken to load each object
Here are some tools to help you build a blisteringly fast website
Webwait
This tool has a nice feature that allows you to set the test to carry out multiple requests. Once the test is complete, it gives you an average speed over the number of runs completed. It also allows you to download the results as Plain Text, HTML or CSV.
Webslug
You can compare two pages on one test run which is useful for testing against competing websites. Once the test has completed, the report summarises the winner and loser.
Web Page Analyzer
This has become quite an industry tool. The statistics collected during the test are broken down and are easy to understand. It also provides recommendations on how to fix any issues found. One neat feature included in the report is the time it takes to download each object based on a visitor's connection type.
WebSitePulse
There are a couple of options available to test your website and page speed. When setting up the test you can choose a geographic location to run the test from. Currently there are only three locations. The report also details the speed of your site's DNS, any redirects and the speed of the first and last bytes.
Site-Perf.com
This is one of the best online testing tools available. It offers lots of advanced features, which give you a realistic report. One of these is HTTP-Compression, I am sure the most of the others' tools do not take this into account when testing.
Uptrends
You can choose 21 different test locations worldwide, which is great if you are targeting global traffic. The waterfall report displays the order in which the objects download the time taken for each one.
Demon Solutions
Another comprehensive tool that allows multiple location tests, number of runs and HTTP Auth if you are testing a protected page. The reports are also nicely laid out and very informative.
Load Impact
Load Impact's system does a really nice job of emulating different browsers and settings. Within the advance settings you can set up HTTP Authentication and select the internet connection type for the test. The reports are well laid out and contain a good explanation of how it works.
Pingdom
This seems to be a very popular tool for load speed testing. It offers a nice report and you can save the reports so you can check the difference your changes have made.
Some others that are worth looking at
Here is a list of other tools that I came across whilst researching this post. Most of them are quite basic, only reporting back on download speed of the entire page as one figure. Ideally you want to be looking at all the objects to see which ones are too big and need optimising.
- www.submitplus.com/freeloadtest.php
- www.webtoolhub.com/tn561353-website-speed-test.aspx
- www.numion.com/stopwatch
- www.vertain.com/?sst
- internetsupervision.com
- www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php
- www.iwebtool.com/speed_test
- www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/speedtester.html
To Conclude
There isn't one tool that does all. I think that it's important that you bookmark and use them all, as they each offer something slightly different. It's important that you speed test your website with as many different scenarios as possible to cover all users' situations.
I hope you find the above tools helpful in helping diagnose and fix your website's download speed. Oh and please don't show your age by commenting about 14.4k modems!