WebPagetest.org – top tool

March 5, 2010 8:04 am | 12 Comments

I’m loving WebPagetest.org. In Even Faster Web Sites I said, “[WebPagetest] hasn’t gotten the wide adoption it deserves.” It got a boost after Matt Cutts mentioned WebPageTest.org in his interview with WebProNews. But I still meet people who aren’t aware that this great performance tool is out there, so let me bang their drum some more.

Pat Meenan and Eric Goldsmith are the team behind AOL Pagetest and WebPagetest.org. AOL Pagetest is the Windows tool that works in IE. Pat took that and put it behind a web server running in his basement and called it WebPagetest. That was two years ago. He took the Open Source route and now there are instances of WebPagetest running in Virginia, California, UK, China, and New Zealand hosted by AOL as well as Strangeloop Networks, Aptimize, and Daemon Solutions.

The power of WebPagetest.org is that it’s web-based – you don’t have to do any installs and you can run it on any OS and browser. On the backend, WebPagetest runs the page in either IE7 or IE8 and displays the results. This might be a limitation for some folks – if you want to test a page on Mac OS X using Safari you’ll have to do that with some other tool. But the fact that IE 7&8 are the dominate browsers means you can see the most typical experience regardless of what platform you’re currently working on. Since many developers work on Mac using Safari or Firefox, and more are moving to Chrome, it’s important that they can easily see how their web pages load for a majority of their users.

New Test

Here’s how it works: Go to the New Test tab. Enter the URL you want to test and click submit. Pretty easy! 90% of the time that’s what I do, but there are other options you can tweak:

• pick a geo location – VA, CA, UK, CN, or NZ
• choose IE7 or IE8
• choose a connection speed – Dial, DSL, FIOS (Dial and DSL are done via throttling)
• test just the first (empty cache) page load or first and repeat
• repeat the test up to 10 times to get a bigger sample size
• opt to keep your test results private if desired

Results

The results page shows summary stats (page load times, bytes downloaded, # of HTTP requests) and a mini performance analysis (compression, image optimization, concatenating scripts and stylesheets). But the piece I love is the waterfall chart.

If you click on the mini waterfall, it takes you to a larger view where you can do additional customizations. I’ve been relying on this for my current series of blog posts on P3PC (performance of 3rd party content). And Pat even added a few options I requested. You can set the size of the image, remove certain requests (for example, I sometimes remove favicon.ico), and whether to show the extra bits on CPU and bandwidth utilization. I end up with clean waterfall charts like this:

And there’s more – Video!

When you create a new test, you can opt to record a video of the page loading (go to the Video tab under “Step 4 – Test Options” in the figure above). WebPagetest generates a filmstrip of images as well as a video. The image filmstrip shows what the page looks like as it loads. You can choose different time increments (0.1, 0.5, 1 and 5 seconds). Wikipedia is pretty straightforward as it loads. Here’s the filmstrip for FOX Sports. Content arrives in the 0-5 second range, more images (like the logo) are filled in from 5-10 seconds, and flash arrives by the 15 second mark. You can also view the video.

Pat does a lot of this work on his own time and all the video features are in Alpha, so be tolerant. I use WebPagetest.org daily and it has become one of my favorite performance tools. Definitely give it a try.