We have all wondered at some point just how fast our website loads. Maybe it loads fast for us because we are on it so much that it is cached or maybe we live close to the datacenter where our site is hosted. Some people just check the speed of their site with one utility, but I like to check it with many. By doing this we can be pretty sure that we get results from all over the country or even the world so we know how well our website REALLY performs. One of my favorites is Pingdom Tools, they have two locations in the US and one in the Netherlands. Pingdom breaks down your website piece by piece so you can see which parts , for example JavaScript or large images are taking a long time to load. A couple more sites that are similar to Pingdom are GTMetrix and WebPageTest.org. PageSpeed Tools is offered by Google and will test your page speed like the others and also gives some good insight and best practices that can be applied to make your website load faster and be more efficient, this is also the tool that displays your site health in your Google AdSense account.
Have you ever visited a website and thought “Man, this website loads quick, I wonder who their host is?”. Check out WhoIsHostingThis.com and enter the domain and find out who the host is. Another awesome tool I found is WhichLoadsfaster.com . Enter two URL’s and it will test them side by side to see which loads faster. A little while back I was looking into switching hosts and created accounts on a couple of different hosts to try and restored a backup of my blog and was able to test the current live site side by side the test site on the new host to see which one truly loaded faster. Ethos Design Co is a good example of a fast loading website, which makes sense since they are a web design company.What tools do you use to measure the speed of your website?
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