Ensuring a fast, responsive web site for your visitors is one of the best – and often least expensive – ways to improve the ROI of a web presence. There is no sense in releasing something out onto the Internet if all your visitors are going to leave early, and miss the message out of sheer frustration, boredom, or a poor overall experience. On the web you typically have mere seconds to make people happy.
Unfortunately this important component of any good web optimization strategy can get overlooked in the mix of web development, online marketing, web analytics, and SEO programs. As with most things in life, striking the right balance for your web site visitors is the key, though with the right tools and measurements in hand it does not have to be a painful experience.
Here are a couple of methods to help you judge the speed of your own website from a visitor’s point of view:
1. Speed testing your web pages.
There are plenty of web page speed analyzers online, though your mileage with these can vary depending on the location of the test server (no sense using an Australian server if most of your clients are from Texas), and the competency of the developer who launched them. I’ve had pretty good luck with Web Page Analyzer by WebSiteOpimization.com. Their President wrote the book on Website Optimization (literally, it’s published by O’Reilly), so he knows a thing or two about website performance. I have also used Pingdom’s free Tools For Webmasters which gives a nice visual report and a little more functionality.
Another useful tool is the Firefox plugin YSlow from the Yahoo! Developer Network. It analyzes web pages, grades them by performance, and makes multiple suggestion on how to increase performance. This plugin requires the Firefox Firebug web development plugin as well, so make sure you have it installed as well (first). YSlow takes its grading criteria from the Yahoo! Developer Network article “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site“, which is excellent reading for the technically inclined.
2. Load Testing / Stress Testing your site.
If you have a large website, or a corporate site that can expect to get bursts of simultaneous visitors, you will probably want to invest in load performance testing, or stress testing. There are a number of companies that offer load testing services of various sizes and strengths – including Webperformance and Load Impact. There are software-based solutions available for this as well like the free Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool and the more complicated Apache JMeter, but they are, generally speaking, best left to the professionals who know what they are doing.
An important note: NEVER stress test a live site without the knowledge and agreement of the webmaster and the web analyst. And NEVER NEVER run one of these tests against a shared hosting solution unless you want to make your web hosting provider very angry. Load testing can bring a web server to its knees, so it’s important to know how to fix this before you start.
3. Determine your vistors’ connection speeds.
Most web analytics packages, including Google Analytics can give you some idea as to the connection speeds of your visitors. You’ll want to be careful with this, however, because it’s typically a the solution’s best guess using a combination of testing methods, with “unknown” typically being the largest single group. Still it’s a useful measurement to consider because if you’re about to roll out a fancy new media-rich web site, and 25% of your visitors are on some form of dialup connection (or even slower DSL connections, these days), you risk losing them due to reduced performance.
Hopefully this post will get you started in evaluating, or at least thinking about the speed of your own web site from your visitor’s point of view. A couple of the topics are a little on the advanced side, so feel free to contact me (via email or through the comments) if you have any questions, further advice, and/or experience with similar speed testing solutions.
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You may be interesting in Site-Perf.com too – looks like tools.pingdom.com but somewhat more functional and detailed.
Thanks for the tip, Zuborg. I’ve just had a look and it is more detailed. It’s also the only free web site testing tool I’ve seen that lets you test from a couple of different geographic locations, which is a really great idea.