The Numion Stopwatch

A good friend told me about a tool recently that is a very simple way to measure just how fast your blog loads. Sure, there are many of these utilities available on the Internet, but this one is free and easy to use, so it qualifies for a mention.  It is The Numion Stopwatch.

Numion’s suite of tools includes “Yourspeed” and “Sitespeed” in addition to “Stopwatch.” In their “Bandwidth Calculators” they provide any type of visibility needed to help you tweek as much performance out of your blog or web site as possible.

In A Slightly New Look, I pontificated about the value in keeping a blog lean enough to load quickly and talked about the updates I had made to the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit.  While I have added some things since then, you’ll see my measurements still aren’t bad.

Every day,  I visit sites where there is so much animation, feed gathering, and widget population going on, it seems to take an eternity for the page to load.  The Numion Stopwatch provides a look at the page loading and clocks it in a frame.  Different types of sites of course have differing kinds of content, but it would seem obvious that keeping the page load fast would be pleasing to visitors.

CNN on the Clock

Let’s look at CNN.com.  CNN is known for its big pipes out to the Internet, so it makes sense that in spite of considerable content on their home page, their load time is an impressive 3.56 seconds.  That was achieved with a not insignificant amount of pictures and ads.

Google on the Clock

Now, let’s look at the Lean-Master, Google.  Google’s pattern is that of stark necessity only, with an occasional updated logo commemorating a special day.

Even more rarely will they bring awareness to a serious topic.  Again, their page loads almost as fast as the Enter Key or the mouse click retorts.  Here, clocked at a blazing 0.23 seconds.  Amazing, yes, but also expected.

The Kit on the Clock

In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s look at The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit.  I have to admit, I did a few tests to see what what “typical.”  The reason? Adgitize has been having no end of server problems in recent weeks and I had to try enough times to not let their problems skew the results. This appears to be a fair measurement at 3.401 seconds.

These are valid and positive examples, but I will hold short of throwing anyone under the bus with bad times.  You know how you are – and if you don’t, I would recommend using the Numion Stopwatch to find out.

Thanks,

Dave