Everyone knows how annoying it can be having to deal with websites that take forever to load. As per some recent researches, almost 75% of the Internet users do not return to sites that take longer than four seconds to load. A Fast loading website is the first step to a successful online presence, but you will be surprised how many scripts and widgets may be slowing your site to a crawl.
10 Free Tools to Check the Website Loading Time
1. iWebTool Speed Test
- Simple tool to test your website’s loading time and compare with other websites. great tool for benchmarking. It allows you to enter up to 10 websites, and the results display the size of the website, the total loading time and the average speed per KB.
2. Pingdom Tools
- Pingdom is a popular uptime performance monitoring service for websites and servers. They also host a free load time test for web pages. The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes) and displays the load time of all objects visually with time bars. Also see the statistics like the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
3. Internet Supervision Webserver Monitoring Tool
- InternetSupervision.com monitors the availability, performance, and content of your website, web server and internet services from across the globe. If you ever wanted to know how much time it takes to load your website from different locations in the world, this is the tool for you.
4. Webslug Loading Time Test
- Webslug measures load time as the user sees it. The time it takes for a page to load fully from when the request was made. The main benefit of Webslug is that it doesn’t require any download or any program to be installed. Just enter your website’s address and it’s all done in your browser.
5. OctaGate Site Timer
- Very similar to Pingdom Tools
6. Site-Perf.com
- Though this looks similar to Pingdom tool, it goes a step further by letting you decide the test server location and Max threads per host value. Very good and very accurate!
7. LinkVendor Website Speed Check
- The website speedtester shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.
8. Website Optimization – Web Page analyzer
- 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. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.
9. Uptrends Web Page test tool
- The full page test tool allows you to test the load time and speed of a complete HTML page of your website, including all objects such as images, frames, CSS stylesheets, Flash objects, RSS feeds, and Javascript files. The full HTML page test tool will analyze the page and download all the objects, displaying the corresponding load times, the object sizes, and which objects are missing, including content from third party suppliers such as advertisements. With the full HTML page test tool you will be able to analyze in detail which object slows down your web page, and how to optimize your website. The load time of all objects is visualized with time bars.
10. WebWait
- WebWait is a website timer. You can benchmark your website or test the speed of your web connection. Timing is accurate because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.
Raju PP is the founder-editor of Technically Personal, which is one of the most widely read technology blogs on the web. He holds an Engineering degree in Electronics & Communication, and has previously worked as a Technical Specialist in Banking Software domain.
wow really a very useful post for all webmasters!!
Hey, pretty useful tools and a great read. Thanks for the share.
A exhaustive list!! Loved it…
Hey man, nice list. I checked my site. It took 2.04 seconds. Is that bad?
Nihars last blog post..Win a Flip Mino HD at Smarter Wealth Contest
@Rishi, Sid, Samrat,
Thanks guys!!
@Nihar,
It depends on which site you used to test. If its overall site load time, its great, if its just html loading time then its good
Nice collection buddy. Stumbled
Madhur Kapoors last blog post..Synchronize files and folders with Allway Sync
@Madhur,
welcome to TechPP 
Thanks
sweet list stumbled and acquired for later use
@Raju you covered almost all tools to know about website laoding time ,very useful for bloggers thanks for sharing
Great collection of tools man…stumbled.
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very very nice list Raju! i knew some but i found out about some really neat ones!
Great tools. I am a big fan of the web page analyzer by WebsiteOptimization.com. But I definitely like the site comparison that you can easily do with that iWebTool test.
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personally, i think website optimization is the best!
wonderful list my friend. dugg!
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Hi there
I wish to discover how different settings effect my website loading time.
After checking a few of the tools you described here, I realized that every test is “noisy”, in the sense that if I run it a second later I might get a different response time.
I thought of trying to overcome this by running multiple tests on the blog loading time in one setting, and then changing the settings and running another set of loading time tests, and then comparing the two stacks of loading time numbers (I guess a simple t test will do – I am a statistician, so the data analysis part will be the easy part).
I need your advice in:
1) finding a way to automatically run multiple loading time tests. (instead of me manually using one of the tools listed above tens of times)
and
2) if you have any response to the general idea I proposed here.
Thanks,
Tal
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@Tal,
Infact the last one in the last (http://webwait.com/) does exactly that. Check that and let me know if that helps.
@Raju,
Thanks for the comment,
The problem with the last service is that it gives the mean loading time, but doesn’t give the raw numbers (or standard errors) of the sample of loading time.
What this means, is that when I’ll try to compare two settings, I couldn’t know if one is faster then the other “for real” or “by chance”.
Any idea how to get the raw list of numbers ?
Thanks
Tal
@tal,
I am not sure what you are looking for. None of the service can be so much accurate, lot of factors influence the loading speed, like number of concurrent users (at the time of testing), load on the server (if shared hosting) etc., I suggest you to make changes to your settings, run the test a few times, take the mean time and then again change the settings and repeat the process. Its just one time activity, you don’t need to optimize your site everyday right?
you have a nice list. which one is best out of these ?
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I’ve recently upgraded WebWait, partly in response to some email converesation with @tal, and one of the enhancements is providing raw data.
you have a nice list. which one is best out of these ?
great list. I really liked the webwait interface. I found it the easiest to use.
Pretty nice tools Raju!
I like Pingdom tool the most!
I tried to test an intranet site and none of these worked for me. May be webwait to certain extent with JS errors and incorrect load time. I have site relative paths for all the page resources. Is there any tool which works for intranet sites ?
This was the best page I could find. I just tested my sites on all the speed test sites listed here. Im very, very happy. Now I know that my sites are fast. Wow! What a great resource. Thank you so much.
Hey Everyone,
Very nice information. I used some on my websites and was able to get a good understanding about the load time and what exactly was going on in my sites.
I just checked my site on it.It gave exact result. Thanks for sharing.
This is a good top 10 listing. One thing I found is that these are more accurate than the Firefox plugins I’ve used in the past. WebsiteOptimisation tool didnt seem to work for me. Preference is for the iweb as you can load multiple URLs.
Great list. I checked my website on it. load time 0.39 sec..Thank you so much…
I checked my website loading time using all this 10 links, but the result varies from websites,..my website loading time is 0.49 seconds..i verified why it is taking such a long time,..google .com takes 0.09 sec..
Hi,
Great list……..
I checked my website on it. load time is good..Thank you so much.
Thanks much for the list.. checked mine and shows good result..
This is a awesome tool, I just now tested my website loading time, it seem to be okay, but i find a lot of difference while cross checking through other tools.I am confused which one to consider as correct.
Thanks for sharing, very informative