URL of Site to Time:

About SiteTimer

Web Monitor allows you to monitor how long it takes for a user to download one or more of your web site pages.

It visits the page that your request and downloads all content that's directly linked from that page;

• Images
• Frames
• IFrames
• Script files
• It follows redirects

As the pages are downloaded, SiteTimer stores statistics on how long time each item takes to download, and how much data they contained. This information is then presented in a grid.

Web Monitor correctly handles http compressed material (see OctaGate Switch), and it also honors keep-alive requests to give an accurate indication of the times a real browser would spend downloading the content.

Optimizing your site

Your page shouldn't take too long to load, slow load speeds will lead to users leaving your pages even though they're interested in the material. Users are becoming less and less accepting when it comes to slow sites as internet maturity increases.

The size of the page is the main deciding factor for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be. To reduce the size of your pages, you can;

Decrease the size of your images:

• Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
• Use harder compression on your jpg images
• Make the images smaller in size
• Reduce the number of images
• Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

If the first part of your page loads fast, and the parts that aren't visible yet take longer, than that's ok, because the users don't care about information that they're not ready to look at yet.

Reasons for slow load speeds

Pages can be slow to load for a number of reasons;

• As mentioned above, the pages are simply too large
• Your bandwidth is insufficient for the load that the users place on the page, in which case you'll need to upgrade your internet connection or migrate to a data center.
• Your servers are overloaded and can't cope with the load that's placed on them, even though there's bandwidth to spare. In this case, you'll need to invest in more or better hardware. You may also want to look into load balancing.
• Your users have low bandwidth - not all users have broadband, and even if they do, they may be located somewhere where internet connectivity is bad. Your only option here is to reduce the size of your page. Additionally, users may be on mobile devices such as cell phones, which have low bandwidth compared to broadband connections.

Technical Details About SiteTimer

If you want more technical details about OctaGate SiteTimer, please see this version of the page.