But, if I did, I would hire these guys to help:
WebSiteOptimization.com
Why? Because their own site is mighty fast. It shows they know what they are talking about.
One could argue that they succeed with speed by failing at design. True, the site design is pretty bland. But for a firm that promotes itself as web performance experts, I like that approach.
Why am I talking about this?
I have used a few web performance tools in the past, but learned about a new tool tonight via a tweet. It is called, WebPagetest.org. Tempted, I tried it out and found it useful.
It is a free tool, and is supported with embedded ads. Two ads that appeared while I was using it were for other performance monitoring tools. It made me think to see how well those guys perform on their own sites. A quick gauge of street cred.
Surprisingly, the sites didn't do well. I expanded the experiment, and found that most of the sites of vendors in this space are slow to load. Yikes.
Instead of passing judgment, I will simply pass on the results. The numbers indicate page load time in seconds. The first number is for the first request, and the second number is for a refresh (with the advantages of caching).
- WebsiteOptimization.org .76 / .70
- PassengerPro 2.2 / 2.1 seconds
- Neotys 5.0 / 4.4 seconds
- Pingdom results 7.2 / 1.2 seconds
- Soasta results 12.5 / 5.6 seconds
- Gomez results 9.5 / 5.8 seconds
- AlertSite results 10.1 / 7.9 seconds
- Keynote 14.4 / 5.6 seconds
- WebPagetest 2.0 / 1.1 seconds
hmm a very late comment - still, not testing the homepage for two of the above makes a comparison not really fair.
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