5 Page Load Time Analysis Tools to speed up your website

Page Load Time is a significant factor in determining your sites quality. Forget the bots, they are well developed these days to crawl the most difficult pages, but if you’d like to keep your visitors happy, then keeping the page load time to a minimal time would be a great idea.

So what are the factors that will determine your page load time Or what are the factors that will slow down your page ?

1. Large number of images
Use of large number of images will slow down the page in slower internet connections, either optimize the images or use less number of images.

2. Long HTML content
Google and other search engine bots can pretty much deal with bigger chunks of code now, compared to the early times when they would truncate the code. But still, using large chunks of code will make the page “bloat” and cause slowness in browsers.

3. Too many http requests
Increased number of http requests by scripts and otherwise will only slow down the page, its recommended that you keep it to a minimum level.

4. Invalid codes and loops
Obviously having a broken code that does not fit the W3 org specifications might lead to page bloating and slower load times. While its easy to say this, its extremely difficult to get the code completely valid.

5. Heavy or improper use of scripts
As you might already know, heavy use of javascripts particularly in the early portions of the code might lead to longer page load times.

So here are five cool tools that will help you check your page load time and probably help you fix a few loose ends in your site’s code.

1. Pingdom Page Load Test tool

One of the most popular tools out there, this one will simulate you a page load test for your site and tell you what factors cause the longer page load time. Pretty informative tool.

2. Website Optimization Speed Test Tool

A nifty tool that will give you a much better and deeper analysis of your page and show you the factors gone wrong. It does not give you a visual graph but shows things more in file sizes.

3. Uptrends Page Load Test Tool

Another great tool that will help you check your page load times from different physical locations worldwide. you can check page load time from places like New York, Singapore, Shanghai, Toronto, Berlin etc. A great way to see what your visitors would experience while visiting your website.

4. Submit Plus Page Load Test

This is another great tool that will give you clear idea on what’s going wrong on your website. No unnecessary data here, but very clear pointers on what’s taking long to load.

5. Link Vendor Page Load Test tool

This tool will show you categorically how many elements load up, like how many images, how many scripts, how many stylesheets etc. Also gives you the page load time on different connections, from 1 TB connection to Dial Up modems.

So, there you go, five excellent tools that will give you precise idea on why your page load time is slow and where you can improve to speed it up.

P.S – There is no need to panic if your page load time is slow, it may not affect the search engines as seriously you may think. Remember they got clever recently ? But you need to consider your visitors, so this is totally your call.