Want to know how well your website is actually performing? Just how long does it really take to load?

Well now you can find out with this helpful little website called site-perf.com

Site-perf.com gives you an accurate, realistic and useful estimation of how long it takes your website to load. Bearing in mind that the single biggest reason why people browse away from websites is that pages take too long to load, wouldn’t it be useful to know whether your website is driving visitors to your call-to-action pages or just plain driving them crazy?

Site-perf.com fully emulates natural browser behaviour and downloads your website pages with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user would.

Give it a try, for free, at www.site-perf.com. When you’ve entered all your website details and hit ‘Go’, you’ll be presented with a (potentially) bewildering array of stats and figures. These are definitely worth getting to grips with but, for the sake of brevity, look for the Download time. This will tell you, in seconds, how long it takes your page to download.

What is a good download time, and what is a bad one? That really is a case of how long is a piece of string… the best way in our opinion of judging this is how long you would be prepared to wait for a page to download. 2 seconds? 3? 5? It’s a pretty good bet that if you wouldn’t wait 10 seconds for a page to load, then neither would your visitors.

If your download times are too high, then there are several ways that you can speed things up and we’ll be addressing some of these in future blog posts as well as in our articles section. Also, check out Patrick's new blog as he will be covering some of these topics from time to time (when he’s recovered from a bout of man flu and stopped feeling sorry for himself!)