One of my favorite services for developers and entrepreneurs is Pingdom. They offer a tool which notifies you if your website is down or non-responsive. I also like Pingdom because their staff is very responsive. The company is based in Sweden.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on testing and optimizing the speed of my websites. Google has stated that the faster a website is, that there might be a chance for better rankings. Better speed also makes for a better experience and more importantly for a smaller load in weight and time.
Pingdom has a speed testing tool which I’ve been using and it’s really sweet. It’s free to use and you can test to your heart’s delight. By using the Pingdom speed test tool, I found that my style sheet was pulling in old images. By removing those images, I increased the speed by nearly 50% overall.
The tool tracks: total loading time, total objects, external domains, html, xhtml, css, images, scripts and plugins. The graph loads in real-time so you can watch how a browser loads your objects one by one. There are tools including Yahoo’s YSlow and Google Chrome offers some of this functionality but the Pingdom tool just seems easier to use and you can save the tests as well.
Leave a comment if you know of other good, reliable speed testing tools.