How much time is acceptable isn’t always up to you, though. It’s in the eyes of the beholder, hence the readers.

If you have a mostly content based website and it takes two minutes to load, there is 99.99% chance the person will not wait for the page to finish loading. These days, people want information and web sites to be practically instantaneous.

Like most people, you will have mostly text-based content with a few images, JavaScript, and jQuery thrown in for effect, but assuming you’re not a media website your readers will want a fast loading and fast performing website.

Below you’ll find the best of the best tools on the internet to profile your website. One query at a time. And best of all, they are all free! Jump right in to read on… This first tool is the one you will probably want to check first.

Pingdom Tools

It gives you a complete profile, file by file as your page loads. This will let you know exactly which files, JavaScript or images are slowing down your page. You might even find out that your host is slow. You never know what surprises you’ll find.

Pingdom Tools

For example, using just this tool alone I brought my main websites loading time down from a whopping 13-16 seconds to 3-6 seconds! What what wrong? I found out that my site was still loading a few old plugins and that two or three other plugins where creating this huge delay!

Though one tool is never good enough. Let’s look at some other available tools to get a nice average time and to make sure the load times are similar. Google Page Speed tool is another great one.

InternetSuperVision.com

This won’t give you a line by line profile, but it will give you load times from many sources. You can use this to compare times with what you observe and with what you received from Pingdom Tools!

Internet Super Vision

SearchMetrics.com

This great little website speed tool will tell you the time it takes on the current connection to load your page AND estimates on how long it will take to load on several other connection types including DSL, cable, and T1!

Rapid Search Metrics

It also tells you how many images, JavaScripts and CSS files it found and how large each is (and the totals). That way you know exactly what is eating up the most bandwidth.

WebsiteOptimization.com‘s Web Page Optimizer

This is probably the most detailed free analysis tool you will ever find. It gives you a breakdown for each and every file type and even gives some pretty good recommendations.

WebSite Optimization

Even on my hand made, extremely small site IMRList.com I was told to shrink the size, compress my images and JavaScript and a few other things. You’ll learn a lot from the recommendations on this site.

You’ll mostly learn how to make a well-optimized website that is standards complaint! Double the awesome since this tool is free!

Here’s something even better, though: the site can accept a URL to check for you, but it can also take code. So you can take your (X)HTML, plug it right into their site and POOF! It will tell you if you need to improve anything.

Uptrends.com

This site is similar to Pingdom’s tool but less flashy. Though it will give you practically the same results.

UpTrends

OctaGate

A quick site with very detailed results about when each connection starts and stops per HTTP request.

OctaGate

WebWait

Webwait

This is a very simple tool. Enter your address and it will load up and time your page in an iframe. But it’s not like all the others. It also has a very useful interval feature. So you can keep testing a site over and over to get more accurate results.

You can set the number of times it tests and at what interval. Splendid for repeated testing so that you don’t have to keep reloading a testing website.

WebToolHub

This is another simple tool. This is better suited to testing your servers than just your websites. So it’s a good tool to find out exactly what’s slowing your page down: your code or the server!

Web Tool Hub

iWebTools

If you have multiple domains or sites to test, this is the tool for you. It’s quick, easy and gives results for multiple domains. Just enter them into the large text area box and hit Test!

iWebTools

If you have any special tools that you use to profile the performance of your website, let us know in the comments!

This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure about affiliate links here.