How to Calculate the Loading Speed of Pages

Keep track of how long it takes to load website pages.

The speed of a website can determine whether you return to that site again or not. It can also be a crucial factor in other people coming to your own site, should your work or hobby revolve around an Internet-based medium. Kohavi and Longbotham, researchers and architects for Microsoft, studied one particularly popular online marketplace and noted that for every 100 ms increase in load time decreased sales by 1%. It's crucial to be able to determine how fast your website loads in order to optimize performance and, potentially, sales.

Instructions

1. Visit the Pingdom Tools website. This website offers free load time testing for any URL that you desire.

2. Type in a URL of your choice into the text box and click "Test Now."

3. Scroll through the page of results. You will see a series of horizontal bars with URLs to the far right that shows load time (in seconds) associated with all of the objects that load, as well.

4. Arrange your overall view in one of five ways: load order, load time, file type, URL or file size. Depending on your interests, or what metrics you're analyzing, you can customize the read out to your demands.

5. Refer to the abridged table on the bottom left of the website. This gives a easy-to-read snapshot of total loading time, total objects loaded, external objects, as well as other items and data that come with loading a web page.

Tips & Warnings

• Pingdom notes at the bottom of the page that "this version doesn't load objects included in Java Scripts. We have also put a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded (to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example)."

• When looking at your results, as noted in Step 3, the section from yellow to green represents start to connect time, the green section represents the time from connect to the first byte loaded and the blue section represents the time it takes to load the first byte to the last byte.

References

• Pingdom: Test the load time of a web page
• Pingdom: Example of load time for Demand Studios home page
• Peer1: Send this page to a friend. From: To: Message: How a Slow Website Impacts Your Visitors and Sales