Monitor site loading speeds

[eunaneunan]

We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server.  But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors.  I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low.

When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results  e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. )

Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why.

Does anyone know of any good reliable  programs or sites that does this?

[akaigotchi]

One method: Install JMeter on a remote machine in a VERY remote location and perform regular performance tests with it. Downside to this method: Values may not be exact as JMeter is not a browser but a site testing tool, so values may differ significantly from your browser experience. http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

Another method: Webservices such as yottaa.com. They offer performance testing and monitoring. I think they also might be using a JMeter implementation, at least it sounds like it www.yottaa.com This may be the easiest solution, and I'd definitely give it a spin, but maybe you shouldn't rely on their data as your only source.

Third method: Build your own testing tool based on Googles PageSpeed SDK. http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/ That would be my favourite, but you need someone with coding experience

Sure, these were all rather advanced options (except for yottaa.com) but if you want to have reliable data you should take your time and use a proper tool.