10 of the Best Web Page Weight Analysis Tools
Unless you continually monitor page weight, you won’t know how your diet is progressing. The average page now exceeds 1.7Mb and increased by 32% in 2013 alone. If your developers are secretly gorging themselves on fattening widgets, any of the following assessment tools will highlight their gluttony. They’re all free and take a few seconds to run — what are youweighting for…
1. Pingdom
Pingdom is one of my favorite online tools. It reveals everything you could possibly need to know: page weight, download speed, code analysis, performance grades, development suggestions and even a historical timeline to record your dieting progress. If you only use one analysis tool, Pingdom should be it.
2. Firefox Web Developer Add-on
Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar has been around since the dawn of creation (of Firefox). To use it to view both the compressed and uncompressed page size, select View Document Size from the Information menu.
Note that Web Developer is available as a Chrome extension but, unfortunately, doesn’t have this feature.
3. GTmetrix
GTmetrix shows an aggregated report generated from Google’s PageSpeed Insights and YSlow as well as additional information such as the total page size and number of requests. The online tool is better than both systems, although you can still use them separately.
4. Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights doesn’t show total page weight or download speed statistics but it does indicate where you can make improvements for both desktop and mobile devices. Sites are allocated a score out of 100 so you can quickly evaluate how improvements are progressing.
5. YSlow
Yahoo’s YSlow is an online tool and plug-in available for most browsers. Like PageSpeed Insights, it evaluates pages and issues a grade between A (you’ve done everything you can) and F (you’re failing dismally) for a range of factors.
6. Browser Developer Consoles
If you don’t want to use anything new, Firebug, Chrome Inspector, Firefox Web Developer and IE Developer tools all offer network analyzers and profilers to help assess the size of your pages. Note they won’t necessarily download cached assets so you may need to use Ctrl+F5 or clear the cache prior to testing.
7. PageScoring Website Speed Test
If you require a quick and easy tool, Website Speed Test does the job. It concentrates on download time but file sizes are also displayed, along with the download time for each individual file which could be handy to isolate problem areas.
8. Uptrends Speed Test
As well as the usual size and download speed tests, the Uptrends tool is unique in that it allows you to test responsiveness from specific geographic locations. The report also highlights which domain each resource is served from to help assess CDN effectiveness.
9. Page Speed Tool
Page Speed Tool is well-presented and highlights file sizes, assets, resource groups, and download speeds. Note that the estimated load time appears to be calculated for the HTML source only — not for all files. However, you can get a good estimate of total load time by examining the accompanying waterfall chart that’s generated.
10. Web Page Analyzer
If you can forgive its age and the dated purple and orange design, Web Page Analyzer provides a range of file size statistics as well as download time estimation for modems going all the way back to 14.4K!
Courtesy : www.sitepoint.com
