47% of people will not wait more than two seconds for a website to load. And if you still don’t care about this yet, please look at this infographic: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
I bet you’re wondering now, how long does it take my website to load? (And if you don’t, you are in serious denial my friend.)
Here are some free tools you can use to see if your website’s load time:
http://www.webpagetest.org/
Great for: Testing specific browser versions and locations
So let’s say looking at Google Analytics you know most of your customers are using Google Chrome and located in Argentina. You can test the page load time specifically for this case. Now it’s a free tool so don’t go expecting it’ll have every possibility you’d want but at least it can give you an idea of things.
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Great for: Getting technical ideas on how to fix issues.
If you aren’t looking for a specific load time but want a more technical analysis with some fixes, this tool in the Google Developers section is nice. Specific files are mentioned and the benefit of each fix is also outlined.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Great for: Overview
If part of you is wanting that ‘grade’ (and comparison with how your website is doing compared to others) as well as a detailed breakdown of what is slowing your site down, this is a nice tool.
Now if you want something more, like constant monitoring of your website or analyzing more than one page of your site at a time, there are paid services that take this whole analyzing your site load time to that next level. But if you want a drive by view and are ready to do something about the results, these tools can take you far.