Friday, December 26, 2008

Web Page Analysis

My poor brother mentioned yesterday that it takes forever for my blog to load. He is still using dial-up. Who knew there were people still doing that?

Anyway, I thought I'd check to see how long it takes for the page to load. I found this free Web Page Analyzer, typed my url in and got these results:

Connection RateDownload Time
14.4K1118.46 seconds
28.8K568.23 seconds
33.6K489.62 seconds
56K300.97 seconds
ISDN 128K104.66 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps25.52 seconds

I'm hoping no one is actually still connecting to the Internet at 14.4K!

Anyway, besides giving me the overall download times, it also listed everything on my page and what size it was. Some of the scripts could supposedly be compressed to save bytes, but I really have no control over those, besides evaluating whether I really need them and perhaps removing them. For now, I'm keeping most of them. What I did notice was that images were the biggest source of the problem. I'm not going to stop adding pictures to my posts, but I did limit the posts on the main page, and I removed some images from the sidebar and some extra unnecessary stuff from the bottom of the page. Now my results look better:

Connection RateDownload Time
14.4K 517.48 seconds
28.8K 265.84 seconds
33.6K 229.89 seconds
56K 143.61 seconds
ISDN 128K 53.83 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 17.64 seconds


Hopefully that will help a little. If you'd like to know how long your page takes to load, give the free Web Page Analyzer a try.