Building on our discussion of how important a functional web presence is, I present WebPageTest.org. You simply enter a URL, and the site returns a huge amount of performance metrics that lets you pinpoint any problems in the performance of your site.

For example, I ran a test against is301 (I’ll assume you know that’s the site you’re on). I first ran the test in FireFox with a bunch of tabs open, and it returned predictable results. I know it can take a while for the page to begin the load process, although I was surprised by the First Byte time, which indicates the delay between you as the user making the request for a web page and the browser receiving the first byte of that page. There are many things that can impact that result, from network conditions to the quality of the hosting provider. That’s illustrated by the two tests below, one from FireFox and one from Chrome, the reasons for the First Byte time are clearly contradictory, indicating the fickle nature of the test.

First Byte time in Firefox

First Byte time in Chrome

As some of the details of the test illustrate, the big problem with this site is the images; the ‘F’; grade for ‘compress images’ is expected. I resize some of them, but not all of them, depending on the nature of the photo or image. A picture taken with my phone has a resolution of almost 6000 pixels across, which is HUGE, and the below graph very clearly illustrates that the big bottleneck in the processing and loading of the site has to do with those gargantuan images.

The Big Pictures

There are also some pie charts showing what is essentially the makeup of the site, what takes up the most space, what has the most requests from pages and users, as seen in the following image.

Content

In both the waterfall and pie chart images above, you can click on any of the elements to get much more information about the specific item in a popup. If you take a look at the following image, you can see how the information manifests, and the various types of information it provides.

Details

It’s interesting to see how various sites perform, and if for some reason you are having difficulty with a site, these tests can give you an idea of what the problem is. If you’re a webmaster it’s invaluable knowledge, if you’re a visitor it’s also nice to know.

Or you could just go to downforeveryoneorjustme.com, that works too.