I know of a couple tools to measure end user web site performance and I'm wondering what else is out there. The two major ones I know of are yslow and Google's page speed.
7 Answers
AOL's WebPageTest
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Yeah, I just found this the other day in another answer here. Awesome resource. Especially like the video option! +1 Commented Jul 18, 2010 at 6:55
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This tool is okay but it has one major bug - it counts EVERY image in the stylesheet, even if the image is not used on a page. This is a known issue but they're doing a major rewrite so it may be a while before it's fixed. Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 9:28
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Also, last time I used it it added 20+ seconds loading time for the Facebook like button! Commented Jul 5, 2011 at 9:29
Google has another tool within Google Webmaster tools. Go to your site within Webmaster Tools, click on Labs, and then Site Performance. This will show you what Google believes to be your sites overall performance and average load time. It will also list suggestions on what pages are slowing you down. The tool is relatively new and as such isn't great.
Microsoft provides a tool within the SEO Toolkit that is now included in IIS7. When you do a Website Analysis of your site it will tell you how long it took to load each page.
answered Jul 8, 2010 at 20:28
Zoompf & MSFast/MySpace’s Performance Tracker are two other notable free web performance analysis & optimization tools
What I've gotten in the habit of doing is loading up firebug, which measures every file loading to the ms, and then jumping on a proxy like Tor. Then I can see in real time which files are taking too long to load in say Germany or Australia. Usually at throttled speeds not much faster than dial up.
I'm sure the other serveces mentioned are great but this is a real world way to do it.
Octagate's Site Timer provides a graphical view of the load time if you want a web site, or you can get similar statistics with Chrome and Opera's developer tools.
gtmetrix.com is similar to webpagetest.org, but another option as well.
answered Oct 11, 2011 at 9:15
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+1 Good one, I use gtmetrix for my testing. It really does a good job. Commented Nov 20, 2011 at 2:20
There's a very good metric that never fails for when we tweak (or sometimes un-tweak) our highly successful website. If the pages are even 0.5 of a second slower, sales drop by up to 30%. Sounds crazy, but it's true. When I remember to enable GZip compression and minify our JS/CSS and switched to sprites our sales went up.
answered Jul 8, 2010 at 23:35
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