A business’ website is a core part of its existence. The internet has taken the place of markets and trading zones where sellers and buyers had to be present with their goods and services if they wanted to complete a deal.
Now trade has gone online and what used to go into decorating a display window, training customer-handling staff, putting security devices in place – and everything else that went into a brick-and-mortar place of trade – has been replaced by a website.
This means all efforts, and whatever available expenses there are, should be put into building and maintaining a site that will not only look good, but will also run well, perform its functions as it is supposed to and at all times keep its visitors’ data secure.
One part of creating such a website involves making sure that, after all has been said and done, it doesn’t take ages to load or serve the requested data or information.
For one thing, it is very annoying to the visitors who have incidentally become ever more impatient and expect everything to be served to them in the shortest possible time. While on the other hand, there are search engines that gauge a website’s loading and performance speed, and rank its position in their result pages accordingly – the faster a website loads, the higher it is ranked.
Both can do great harm to a business by driving traffic and customers away or by not being able to attract them in the first place because the sites are buried so low in the search results that they can never be found.
And so, the website developers must do all they can to make sure it is as lean and light as possible and is loaded with functions that run as fast as they possibly can.
But what happens if after all the effort has been put into making it so, it is still as lagging and as slow as it has ever been?
In that case the testing process should move on to outside factors that influence the load speed – perhaps, like the speed that the page is served at by the hosting provider. If they serve the pages slow, no matter how small a website is it will still be slow when viewed by visitors.
So, how do we test the speed of a hosting provider? Well, thankfully we have websites that can do it for us. All that is expected from users is to enter their site’s URL and the results are shown to them in a matter of seconds.
Depending on the results, webmasters can either switch providers (or at the very least ask for better service) or, in the case of satisfying speeds, commend them on a job well done.
So, let us look at some of the more popular speed testing websites out there:
Pingdom Tools is one of the most popular sites out there when it comes to internet speed testing. The site uses real web browsers to test the speed instead of simulating it or using non-user interface methods like command lines, programs and packaged software.
They use instances of Google Chrome (deemed to be one of the fastest browsers in use today) to access the sites and record their performances.
Another popular testing site, WebpageTest is allegedly a partner of some of the largest software companies in the world including webhosting providers like GoDaddy and Host1Plus.
Instead of just using Chrome, they use Internet Explorer as an additional measuring rule. The connection speeds that are used aren’t simulated, but are in fact the actual ones that visitors from all over the world use. This means a website can be tested from various locations to see how the speeds vary.
Another set of features that make this site stand out is that, apart from testing the speeds of normal websites, webmasters can perform advanced testing on transactions involving multiple steps, video capture, content blocking and lots more.
The results are displayed in easy-to-understand charts and there are even checks and suggestions for improvements that can be made.
This website might not offer its services for free, but the payment is certainly worth the bells and whistles it comes with in addition to testing speeds.
The site offers to spot and resolve a website’s performance problems like failed transactions and timeouts in connections. It goes one step further to analyze bugs in frontend applications like Ajax, Flash and Silverlight.
Once the testing has been completed, the webmaster can receive reports or even setup alerts that will send out real-time notifications in case of connection delays, outages, etc., right when they happen. That way, they can take the necessary stops to resolve the issues, hopefully before visitors are even aware they exist.
AlertFox proudly boasts companies like careerbuilder.com and HubSpot among its clients.
With regular monitoring, a webmaster can find out if their provider is delivering as promised or if they are failing at a basic provision of service.
