My method? In your browser, save the webpage. You should get a file foo.htm, and foo.htm_files (or something similar). Measure the size of the folder and add it to the size of the HTML file, and you have a Kb size for your page. Typical 56k dialup gets you speeds of around 5kb/s - 28k half that. Divide your page size by five for a seconds-time for 56k dialup users - note that you're assuming they're not doing anything else. On broadband - if if takes your page more than a few seconds to load over broadband, you need to go back to the drawing board and strip out all that kludgy markup and those prettyfying images.

Reply

Found this link by mistake today.

http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loadi...ime-checker.htm

It uses 4 . 35 kb/sec as a typical speed and will tell you how long your page takes compared to other popular sites. Pretty slick.

Reply

Guys, You must note onething.

If you use the right tags and make best use of HTML, you can decrease the loadtime of your pages considerably.

For example, Suppose you write an image tag

<img src="somefile>

The above tag will work perfectly. However, when your html page loads, it won't show up on your users screen since the browser has no idea about the attributes of the images.

On the other hand, if you specify the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes, after the html page loads, the browser will quickly allocate that much space on the screen and render the rest of the html.

Also, most of you guys might have used advertisements on your site. Sometimes, when the advertising server is under load, your pages will not show up quickly, even thought the html has loaded completely. In such cases, it is best to put the ad-Codes in IFRAMES. This allows to load the ADs irrespective of the time taken by the advertising server to deliver the AD.

Completing the HTML and keeping it as clean as possible is one good way to speed up the pages. Reducing the no. of images won't help is they are not setup properly in html. So, your friend might have a heavy graphic site, but his site would load quicker than yours, If he has used the right tags with right attributes.

 

 

 

Reply

That's all very well, but people still need speed test tools so they can know how any changes they are making are affecting download times.

Reply

I use Dreamweaver, so whenever I need to know how large the file is and how long it will take to download over various connections, Dreamweaver will tell me. I think that Photoshop has a similar feature...but I'm not as sure about that.

Good luck and good coding!

Reply

Well, most people here came up with complicated solutions. I think this is exactly what you looked for:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Enter your URL and check, it will then tell you the total size of your webpage including images, css, javascript etc. It will also show you the download time on different connections, how many external files you are actually using etc. Very useful tool

Reply

Y E S !!! Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much...

Reply

Amezis, jlhaslip: you two obviously don't have the FF Web Developer extension installed.

Reply

Tyssen,
I have lost my network adapter/drivers on my principal machine and have been using a friend's Mac OS X machine for the last three weeks or so. Stuck with it for another few weeks until I get the laptop back.
No FF on this one and I promised I wouldn't mess with it, so don't want to d/l a FF browser for it. I sure miss my old beater * sniff * !

Reply