How fast does your website load onto a customer's screen?

Would you like to know how fast your website loads onto a customer's computer screen? Your could be losing customers if your site load speed is slow!!!

There is some great advice from here at Blogger.com, who suggest that you use "The StopWatch" program which will measure the time for you.

Simply go to their page and enter the URL to be measured and watch the top of the window that opens.

The StopWatch can only measure websites that can be displayed in a frame. Some websites use javascript to break out of frames. This is not a StopWatch bug.

Information from their own website:
Tip: to reload a page and bypass the cache of your browser:
Internet Explorer: Hold the Control key and click the Refresh button on the toolbar.
Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape Navigator: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.
Safari: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload toolbar button.

How does it work?
The StopWatch is a small Javascript that runs on your computer (not the Numion server). It measures the time between the moment your browser starts to load the URL and when the browser signals that it has finished ("Done" in the status bar). The measurement therefore includes fetching and interpreting all HTML (including frames), images, and Javascripts. It does not include content that is handled by plugins. If the page is in the cache then the stopwatch will measure the faster loading time (see tip above). The accuracy is the accuracy of the Javascript timer, on most systems 10 milliseconds.