If you are a webmaster, one important aspect you need to look is the website load time. As a webmaster, one of your primary aim is to make your site load faster. Website load time is also a factor for ranking well in search engines as Google takes this as one of the factors for good ranking. There are many methods to check website load time including the webmasters tool, Page Speed extension and other third party tools. (See article Tech tips: Google’s PageSpeed tools – Analyze with Chrome & Firefox or Tech tips: Google’s PageSpeed Insights – Make your web site faster).

Although there are many free tools to check the website load time, not all of them give you detailed reports on what steps you can take to improve the load time. In this article, we will cover the best 5 tools (which are free) to test the website loading time with detailed reports.

1. Pingdom Full page Test:

Pingdom FPT (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/) is one of the best available tools to check the load time and analyse the results. Full Page Test tool helps you analyse the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. It examines all parts of the website to produce the detailed report.

2. Site Perf:

With Site-Perf.com (http://site-perf.com/), you get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behaviour downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user.

3. OctaGate SiteTimer

SiteTimer (http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/) allows you to monitor how long it takes for a user to download one or more of your web site pages. As the pages are downloaded, SiteTimer stores statistics on how long time each item takes to download, and how much data they contained. This information is then presented in a grid.

4. Web site Optimization

Website Optimization analysis (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/) allows you to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

5. Web Page Test

With Web Page Test (http://www.webpagetest.org/), you can run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.

The article Google’s PageSpeed Service – speed up loading of your web pages and Speed up your Website with Google’s mod_pagespeed might also interest you!

Via nirmaltv