Page load time is very important, if a page takes too long to load some users will just leave and may never come back. Below are two tools that I find very useful when doing page optimizations.

As a Coldfusion developer, I have to say, Coldfire is the best tool that I've encountered for figuring out page load issues with the actual Coldfusion code or the SQL. It works with Firebug and is very powerful. Among other things, it gives you Execution Times for all CFCs and CFM pages in the page you are testing. It gives you detailed information about the queries that are running and their individual execution times. To use it, you must first make sure that your IP Address is saved in Coldfusion Administrator > Debugging IP Addresses (among other things).

For non-Coldfusion things, like CSS or Javascript, a tool that I found is by Pingdom. This will give you a detailed graph listing everything that loads on the page (images, html, css, etc) with specific details about each item like when it starts, how long it takes to connect and when the last byte is loaded. This one is really simple to use, you just go to the link above and submit the URL to the page you are trying to optimize.

Are there any other tools out there that anyone really likes?

-Bridget

This entry was posted on June 5, 2009 at 3:25 PM and has received 840 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.