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Are there any excellent sites out there that evaluate a website's loading speed at different levels of Internet connection?

I have used this site in the past but the information is out of date and I am not sure about its accuracy any longer - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze

I understand there might be a way of controlling the speed of your own connection but I’d rather stay away from the technical aspect of my own workstation.

Finally, are there any good sites that capture global statistics on the most popular connection speeds?

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5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

I use the Firefox extensions:

Firebug PageSpeed YSlow

All three are excellent tools for determining page loading times per component (for the user experience, for PageRank/SEO etc)

If you're looking for raw bandwidth monitoring, check out Speedtest..but ime it's not that reliable (i.e. there are plenty of other factors affecting bandwidth load, such as concurrency or network conditions - but it's not bad for a first view)

N

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+1 for YSlow - on top of speed ranking it gives some other really useful feedback to help optimise a website – Matt Goddard Jun 30 '10 at 9:22
All of them monitor the speed of your own connection right? Ideally, I want a site that evalutes the connection speeds at different levels of connectivity, from slow dongle sticks which you can plug into your laptop on the go, to high speed connections say at work. For example, I may have a quick speed here but Mrs Jones down the road uses a dongle which means the website loads at a slower speed. Cheers. – Gavin Harris Jun 30 '10 at 9:26
Ditto Yslow, use it for a couple of clients' sites. – Ali Jun 30 '10 at 10:48
up vote 2 down vote

I use a program called charles to throttle my connection trmporarily. It is a local installation, but it's prett easy to use. Here's a link that describes the process http://blog.testlabs.com/2009/03/using-charles-for-throttling-bandwidth.html

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up vote 1 down vote

I see some good suggestions have already provided by others so I'm throwing in a related resource that a collegue passed on today and which allows you to compare two sites and see which loads faster, then to delve deeper to figure out why they are either terrible or excel:

http://whichloadsfaster.com/

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Have just tried this and it doesn't seem to be that accurate. I just got it to do 100 tests and it told me that on average, google.com is 59% faster than google.com. – Pete Williams Jul 22 '10 at 10:12
I wonder if that could just be because you're using it to compare the same site against itself (not its intended pupose) My results seemed accurate when I used it to compare two different sites. Anyone else have odd results? – Nathalie Crosbie Jul 26 '10 at 18:20
up vote 1 down vote

Finding out how fast your page downloads isn't very hard, you just need to know the size of your page (I think YSlow works well for that if I remember right), the rest is simple math. (Note: Be sure to not load anything from your browser cache).

The problem I see is that there are many other things affecting the actual load speed of your website. pagespeed.googlelabs.com gives quite helpful feedback on many issues.

Edit: Stats on global connection speeds: http://netindex.com/

Hope that helps, Phil

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up vote 0 down vote

I found the Pingdom Tools quite helpful.

Edit: having re-read your question, they're probably not the right thing for your purpose: they're measuring loading speeds - separately for every involved object - from their services to your site only.

But they do it in a nice and detailed way, so I'll leave the link in ;-)

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