Pingdom Tool: Test the Load Time of a Webpage

When i created this little tech-blog as a mean of hobbying and spreading what i have learn and experienced on IT subjects, I had no idea how people would react to the blog and its contents. But recently i found out that my blog seemed to load extremely slow. I thought it was due to my blog being cluttered, so i created yet another blog and ported all my contents to the new blog. But still, the situation did not improve much. I was worried by this as a slow-loading web page will drive away readers who are either impatient or have a poor connection.

And I thank God for granting this annoying issue along with my blog that i stumbled across this free web service known as Pingdom Tools.

Pingdom Tools is a free Web-based networking tool which grant us users the chance of diagnosing a website based on testing its URL. This tool gives user a variety of information about the loading of a web page, which includes the following elements:

1. Total load time
2. Total amount of objects loaded
3. Total amount of external objects
4. HTML documents
5. RSS/XML files.
6. CSS (Cascading Styles Sheets)
7. Scripts (external JavaScripts)
8. Images (format including .gif, .jpeg, .png, .ico)
9. Plugins (Adobe Flash Player, ActiveX)
10. Redirections to other URLs

The service is really easy to use: users will only need to key in the particular web page address that they wanted to check, and the service will run a diagnostics of the above mentioned elements that made up a web page. The results are made up of graphical models which depict time bars with different color symbolizing different processes in a load. Analyzing the results can be a bit confusing at first, but the service is as kind as to provide us with some useful legends & symbols to better help us understand what is the bottlenecks behind a slow-loading web page.


The service does have its weakness too: It does not load objects included in JavaScripts. The service provider had also put a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded, so as to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example, which can significantly slow down the analyzing process.

After running the test, i was surprised to learn that my blog had issues with the initial loading phase. Further analysis also informed me that excessive re-directions to some external pictures and my blog's main background which is built out of CSS-style scripts are the ones responsible for my blog's sluggish loading. From that point onward, i convinced myself that i simply had to stop grabbing links to external pictures and instead start uploading my own pictures onto the blog for faster web page loading. I also realized that i had to find a way to improve the performance of my CSS-style background sooner or later, or else i would have to eliminate it altogether so as not to annoy readers.

The free Pingdom Tools can be accessed by clicking this link to their website.