Compare website load times with whichloadsfaster.com

While not a groundbreaking necessity (unless you are a webmaster, in which case you should really care about how fast your website loads since website speed is factored into Google’s algorithm), it is always fun to know which of your favorite websites loads the quickest. whichloadsfaster.com is an open source benchmarking project that allows you to do just that.

whichloadsfaster.com is a very straightforward website:

  • Enter the URLs of the websites you want to compare and hit “GO”:

  • Wait for both pages to load, and see the results:

After the results of a comparison have been shown, you can rerun the comparison of both websites again (you can rerun it as many times as you want) and whichloadsfaster.com will display the average of all the runs; so you can get a more accurate understanding of which website is faster. Or, you can share the test…

…or analyze (the “more” button) why each websites loads as slow/fast as it does:

Other interesting features of whichloadsfaster.com include being able to compare the load speeds of a group of websites vs a group of websites (“race”)…

…and being able to easily compare popular websites such as Google vs Bing:

Since loading two websites side-by-side may have the potential for conflict, whichloadsfaster.com gives users the ability to load one website first, then the other. This setting can be changed from “Settings”:

The thing to note about whichloadsfaster.com is the speed test is totally client based. In other words, whichloadsfaster.com tests how fast the websites in question load for you – the speed tests are not done via whichloadsfaster.com’s server. This client based methodology has its advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage, as I already stated, is the speed tests are for you; the numbers reflect a fairly accurate account of how fast the websites in question will load for you. The main disadvantage, then, is the results are not truly accurate. Since the tests are client based, the results will be skewed depending on your geographical distance from the servers of the websites you are testing, your connection speed, etc.

That said, whichloadsfaster.com is a fairly fun tool to waste your Saturday afternoon playing around with. You may access whichloadsfaster.com from the following link:

Supported browsers: All major browsers

whichloadsfaster.com homepage

[via Ghacks]

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