We all know how frustrating it can be to have to wait for a site to load up right!?, so its a good point to try and find out on average just how long people have to wait to view your site, after all if it takes too long, then how long would you wait around for a site to load?, i’d sometimes rather wait for a bus!.
Here is a great and simple tool that actually measures the load time of your site, all you do is enter your domain name, and hit check, hopefully you will get the results back pretty quick!, this site for instance took 2.41 secs to fully display, so not too bad, however if you are over say 6 secs, you might want to find out why its taking soo long to display, and some reasons could be…
- Lots of un-optimized images
- Tons of home page content
- WordPress plugins
- Videos
- Audio Files
Now their are many more than that, but these seem to be the most common, in one case for me I was using a WordPress plugin that was taking far too long to display, so in turn my site was taking over 10secs to fully display, once I got rid of that plugin, it was much better.
If you do have allot of videos/audio files on your blog, you might want to only display them in the actual posts and not on your homepage, you can use the “read rest of entry” cut-off tag in WordPress before you display the video/audio on your homepage, this enables the page to display allot faster.
Images can be optimized to shrink the file size down with most image editors, either by compressing them, or just shrinking them down to a slightly smaller size will work well for most images.
Anyway without further ado, here is the tool to try for your own sites, if you have any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to post them below, I’d be happy to take a look for you;)).
