MobiTest is a free online service that webmasters can use to test the performance of websites on mobile devices. The service is completely free and requires no registration.

Webmasters find the options of the screenshot above on the frontpage of the service. All that it takes to run a test is to enter a website url into the form on the start page. The remaining options are completely optional. They include a menu to select a specific mobile device for the test (several iPhone and Android models mostly from Canada but also the Netherlands and United States), the number of runs, video capturing of the loading and whether the results should be made public or private.

Tests are then started with a click on the Run Performance Test button. The service will add the speed test to the end of the queue. Information about the test’s status are always displayed on the screen.

The developers suggest to bookmark the unique page address to come back later if a lot of websites are listed in the queue.

Each test result highlights several important information. Among them a screenshot of the website and how it is displayed on the selected mobile device, the page loading time and the total size of the page in Kilobytes. MobiTest grades each tested web page and displays a waterfall chart that highlights all connections that were made during the test.

Especially the ability to create a video snapshot of the page loading time on the selected mobile device is handy. As are the different locations and devices that webmasters can choose from. An option to run tests with all supported devices would have been handy.

Webmasters who want to test their website’s mobile performance can head over to the Blaze MobiTest website to do so.

Having optimized the page loading times of quite a few websites, I can say that the benefit is not as visible as many webmasters believe it to be.

Tools are needed to monitor page loading times over time to measure and analyze the optimizations and changes made to the web code and hardware.

Services like GMetrix, YSlow, Google Page Speed or Which Loads Faster.

All have in common that they test the speed at a specific point in time only.

Website Load Tool on the other hand is a Windows program that monitors the page loading time of websites regularly. The initial interval is set to five seconds, which many webmasters may want to increase considering that the default setting will generate quite a few hits and some load otherwise.

The first thing that new users need to do after installing Website Load Tool is to click the options button in the menu bar and in that context menu the Settings link.

Here they can add multiple websites that they want monitored. A switch to the Generic tab displays options to change the monitoring interval in seconds, the use of a logfile and the maximum number of results.

In the example above I have added the three websites Ghacks, Gameokratie and Windows 8.

A click on the Start button in the main interface starts the monitoring of the domains that have been added in the program settings.

The program displays a log in a left sidebar. Selecting a domain from the list displays all logged connection and retrieval attempts.

Success or failure are indicate with colored lights and a status message. The duration and downloaded bytes are displayed here as well.

It needs to be noted that the load time is faster than the load time in a web browser. This is due to the fact that the pages are not rendered. It also appears as if only the HTML document is retrieved from the website, not images and other elements posted on it.

This limits the use of the website monitoring tool somewhat, as it does not replicate the actual page loading times of visitors of the site. Still, it can make sense to run the tool in the system background to analyze the page loading time over days, weeks or months.

The developer has not integrated notifications or alerts which would make sense in a monitoring software.

Windows users can download the latest version of Website Load Tool from Codeplex. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework. The version that is required is unfortunately not listed on the page. (via)

The Page Speed Service is a new addition to the Page Speed family. It basically acts as a proxy, or content delivery network for the website. The benefits according to Google lie in the 25% to 60% improvement range.

Google Page Speed Service is not as complicated to setup as a content delivery network. It does however require a change of nameservers at the domain registrar or web server. The DNS entry needs to point to Google. Here is what the service does:

Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

Probably the biggest advantage over a CDN and local optimizations is that it is less complicated and time consuming. All that it takes is to change the DNS server to make use of recommended speed optimization settings and features such as compression, caching or merging of CSS files.

Google has created an online tool to test the page loading time of the website and the optimized website. A form is displayed on the Web Page Test site. Webmasters need to enter the url of a website that they want to test into the form. The process will take several minutes to complete.

The results page displays the page load time, start render time of the page, repeat view page load time and repeat view render time of both the normal and optimized website.

A test on Ghacks revealed that the optimized service would take longer to load and render. That’s likely because Ghacks is highly optimized for fast page loading times. It could also be because of different kinds of ads that have been displayed during the optimized page’s loading.

The very same page displays a visual comparison of both page loading times. This could be interesting to analyze both states in detail.

A comparison for another website turned out to be more favorably.

This highlights that it is important to check individual websites to make sure that they might benefit from Google’s Page Speed Service.

A click on View Test displays detailed information about the conducted tests. The information display median values and detailed information from Google’s Page Speed tool. Webmasters can use the information to analyze unoptimized areas of their website.

Google plans to offer the service with “competitive” pricing. For now, it is open to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Webmasters and developers who are interested in testing Google’s Page Speed Service can apply by filling out a web form over at Google Docs.

The form requires an email address of a Google Account, a website url that domain ownership needs to be verified if accepted into the trial and the approximate page views per day that the website gets. There is no guarantee of inclusion. Google has not yet revealed the pricing, it will be interesting to see how “competitive” it will be in comparison to content deliver networks.

The official announcement can be accessed here.

Lower page loading times have positive effects on both the web server and visitors, among them improved bounce rates, page views and an increase in returning visitors.

Various online and offline tools are available for webmasters to test the performance of their websites. Two of the most popular ones are YSlow by Yahoo and Page Speed by Google. GTmetrix is a service that runs both performance tests at the same time.

To run the test visit the GTmetrix website and enter an url into the form on the main page. You can run the test as a guest.

It usually takes less than a minute to complete the analysis of the website. Results are then displayed as a summary and in detail.

You find both the Page Speed and YSlow grade at the top, and a breakdown separated in tabs.

The summary gives a quick overview of the overall performance as analysed by the two web reporting tools, the page loading time, page size and total number of requests.

The breakdown lists the various recommendations and grades in detail, with the least optimized items listed at the top.

A click on an individual recommendation displays additional information, for instance which CSS files are not minimized, or which objects are not making use of effective browser caching.

It is usually best to start optimizing items that are listed near the top with a priority rating of high. It is not always possible to do that though. It is for instance not possible to add expires headers for components that are not hosted on the web server the site is running on. One interesting option offered by GTmetrix is the ability to compare different websites with each other.

Websites and their scores are displayed next to each other on the comparison report page. You can compare the summaries and breakdown of individual items easily. That’s handy if you want to compare the performance of several websites that you own, or your own website with a fast or slow loading websites in your niche.

It can happen that you run into a recommendation that you do not know anything about, like specifying a cache validator or combining images using CSS sprites. The site offers recommendations, very similar to those that Google and Yahoo offer on their pages. It is a good start to find how how “things” are optimized.

I usually run the performance report for a site, fix one issue that is high on the priority list, double-check that the website loads as intended, before I re-test the page to get the new performance rating.

A web performance report can only help you that much. It hints at areas of your website that could be improved to reduce page loading times for visitors, and reduce the load on the web server at the same time. It is still up to the webmaster to optimize the site, for instance by installing caching plugins, optimizing images, objects on page or by switching web hosts.

Have you recently run website optimizations? Which tools have you used for that?

Tools have been created to test the page loading time of a website, for instance Yslow or Google Page Speed which both show in detail the loading time and the elements that are responsible for it.

These tools are also used by webmasters to test the loading speed of related website. Those times give the webmaster a good indication if more optimization needs to be done. If a web page loads at least as fast as the fastest competing website then it is usually not necessary to optimize further, if it is slower there might be still room for improvement.

Which Loads Faster is an online service that compares the page load time of two websites by racing them against each other.

which loads faster

The website offers a few preset speed comparisons and the option to create a custom comparison.

To race two pages, a user needs to add two page urls into the form at the top and click the go button. Which Loads Faster will instantly start loading and displaying the websites in two columns on the same page.

Page loading times of both websites are displayed in milliseconds, and the faster one is indicated with an arrow and a percentage value that indicates how much faster it is than the other web page.

The Race link at the top navigation offers another interesting variant. Here it is possible to add up multiple urls to each side to see which loads faster than the other. This could be an interesting option to compare the homepage and several subpages of websites with each other.

The settings contain an option to switch the page loading mode from parallel to serial, helpful if the two sides may interfere with each other.

Which Loads Faster is a free online service that can be very beneficial to webmasters. Additional information about the page loading times would be helpful, for instance a display of the page elements and their loading times or the hardware and software that is powering the different sites. (via To The PC)

We already dealt with improving website performance here at Ghacks and are pleased that Google has added an experimental feature to the Google Webmaster Tools which displays a website’s performance over time.

The performance graph is “derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features”. Google includes a performance rating in the graph that indicates to the webmaster if the performance is rather fast, average or slow.

Even better is the fact that it will display example pages, their load time and page speed suggestions that will provide tips on how to improve the performance of specific pages and the website. Google suggests to use the Page Speed add-on for Firefox to optimize the website further. Webmasters who have added their website to Google Webmaster Tools can check out the Site Performance feature under the Labs link in the left sidebar navigation.

The Page Speed tab can be used to analyze the active website. A website optimization report will be generated that groups the findings into priorities. The high and medium priority groups list elements that should be optimized to increase the performance of the website. Low priority items on the other hand are fully or partially optimized items that can still provide some performance gains but not as much as the medium or high priority items.

Each entry is listed with a short description, priority and an expanding area that lists the elements that are affected and optimization tips on how to resolve the issue. This usually requires some research on how to implement the optimization, the Page Speed homepage is usually a good starting point as it contains some tips on how to resolve some of the issues. Some issues cannot be solved by the webmaster at all, like compressing or combining externally loaded JavaScript.

The Page Speed Activity tab on the other hand displays a timeline of all browser activities including JavaScript processing which makes it easier to spot scripts and elements that are increasing the loading times.

The data is divided into blocks that define elements like network latency, DNS lookups, connection establishment, and JavaScript processing.