What is the easiest way to accurately benchmark the speed of an
e-commerce site?  We have a php/mysql site built on Joomla/VirtueMart
Open source platform at www.thegreenoffice.com  Client says the site's
speed is "unacceptably" slow.  I need an emperical way to measure what
is "slow" compared to industry standards for e-commerce.  Please help!

<Site speed tests.

There are a number of sites that offer free website speed tests. Some
give just the number of seconds it takes to load a page. Others give a
much more detailed analysis.

Vertain software offer a free website speed test
http://www.vertain.com/?sst

I tested your url http://www.thegreenoffice.com
And had the following results
Page speed 7.94 secconds
Compared to 4.84 seconds (average speed of benchmarks)
http://www.vertain.com/m.q?req=cstr&reqid=d9y8Bov7

The following url took 4.56 seconds which is faster than the benchmark.
http://www.thegreenoffice.com/content/view/55/127/

The following url took 4.48 seconds which is faster than the
benchmarkhttp://www.vertain.com/m.q?req=cstr&reqid=d9y8BovA

----------------------------------------------
Websiteoptimization.com offers a much more detailed report.
It gives the download time for 6 connection rates. It also gives an
analysis of page objects and offers solutions for speeding up download
times.

The recommendations that it gives for speeding up your site are:
To reduce the number of objects. There are currently 68 on the page.
Combine, refine, and optimize your external objects. Replace graphic
rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP
requests.
To reduce the number of images on the page. 
To reduce the number of external css files.
To reduce the total size of the page to under 30K.
To reduce the number of exterrnal script files on the page.
To reduce the size of the images.
To reduce the size of the external scripts.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/>


<Search strategy:>

<"site speed" benchmark>
<://www.google.com/search?hl=nl&q=%22site+speed%22+benchmark&lr=>

<free site speed>
<://www.google.com/search?hl=nl&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2006-12%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=free+site+speed+&lr=>


<Hope this helps.>

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Request for Answer Clarification by greenmaven-ga on 04 May 2006 12:51 PDT

It would be great if you could provide some more reputable site speed
tests, as these 2 have much differing results and I need to know which
is most accurate.

Thanks,

Joey Shepp

---

Clarification of Answer by belindalevez-ga on 04 May 2006 13:44 PDT

<Test results will vary as it depends on how much traffic there is at
the time you make the test. Ideally you need to carry out a large
number of tests at different times of day and particularly at high
traffic times to see how well your site performs.


Tracert
This site will test the speed of your website for free to various
places in the world. You need to register.
http://www.tracert.com/sm.html

Numion.
Free software to test the speed of your website. Displays the results as a graph.
http://www.numion.com/SiteSpeed/index.html


There are several speed tests on the Optiview site.
http://www.optiview.com/POV/task,ov4cooltools/parse.html

This site has a number of  load and performance test tools.
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD>

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Before you get to caught up in a discussion with your client about
page load times you may want to read this article.

http://www.uie.com/articles/download_time/

To summarize, The article discusses useability test where respondents
performed tasks on different sites and were asked to rate how fast or
slow the site was.

There was no correlation between download speeds and the users
ratings.  For example the sites that users thought/felt were the
slowest were actualy some of the fastest to load, and vice versus.

However, there was a strong correlation between perceived download
time and whether users successfully completed their tasks on a site.

In the article there are some speeds listed for a few popular sites
that you can use as a benchmark (eg. About.com, amazon.com)