Use Code Profiler to assess the performance times of artifacts that comprise your
site.
Include various access points to your site when testing. It's
important to make sure that your testing accounts for differences in:
- Network speed - testing only on
corporate LANs doesn't accurately test the user experience over
residential access or slower networks.
- Browser Type - pages that appear correctly or quickly on one
browser could appear slowly or not at all on another. Always test cross-browser and
cross-machine. Otherwise, you could miss important performance problems.
- Browser cache contents - clean caches are required to see the
speed experienced by a new user.
- CDN - performance can vary depending
on whether the content delivery network already has your content and how
close you are to a content delivery node.
- Machine speed - developer machines
are typically much faster than the average consumer.
- Machine type - remember to test
against new machine types, such as iPhone and Netbooks
- Load test - include
a load test to measure the server performance. Simpler is better. Simple
pages are easy to maintain and are less error-prone. Search engines can
identify content better and modern devices are supported easily.