For example, pingdom.com provides free tools to measure the speed of websites. Here is a link that uses Pingdom to measure the speed of the JC-J.IN blog:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/eg4dCg/http://blog.jc-j.in
The above link measures the load time from a Google Chrome browser in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Here is another link, but this time measured from Dallas, Texas:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/bY7V29/http://blog.jc-j.in
Pingdom compares the speed of your website to all of the other thousands of speed tests carried out on other websites and provides a ranking. I’m pleased to say that this blog is in the upper 25% of websites in terms of speed. This is where you really want to be, because people expect fast response and Google takes it into account in its search engine page rankings.
Some other free tools for measuring website load times are given below:
The last one has options to test the load times from many different locations around the world. It uses real browsers and you can select different Internet connection speeds to simulate what a real visitor will see.
Another one that I find useful is hyperspin.com. It provides a nice graphic showing the different loading times from around the world. Here is an analysis of blog.jc-j.in:
http://www.hyperspin.com/quicktest.php?action=result&qtid=1003261&r=9364
For comparison, below is the hyperspin analysis for blog.jc-j.asia located on a server in Singapore. You can see how the loading times for blog.jc-j.asia are much quicker in Asia. Clearly, this is important for visitors from Asia. Blog.jc-j.in is located in the UK and has good response times from most locations, but is not as fast as blog.jc-j.asia is in China and surrounding countries.
http://www.hyperspin.com/quicktest.php?action=result&qtid=1003260&r=5896
Which brings me to the Internet version of “The Great Wall of China”. This refers to the system that the Chinese authorities use to control access to websites around the world. Below is a link to the test page at websitepulse.com. You can enter the address of the website you want to test on this page. It will indicate if people in China are actually able to view your website and whether or not the load time is being throttled. It provides four test location servers from inside China – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. And, you can compare the load times with New York, Munich and Melbourne.
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html
Happy speed testing!