Hi folks.

Is it possible to check how long a website will take to load before it is published? I know you can preview a website in progress, but I'm assuming it has to compress the files on the fly which may not be an accurate representation of the final page load speeds.

I know you can publish, test, tweek, re-publish, etc but I just wondered if there was any other way of testing load times? Not a problem if its not possible, I was curious more than anything

Not too sure on that. I do know that when your doing the site on your own machine it will take less, in some cases a lot less than it does on the fly. It's all about keeping images to a minimum. I was looking at a friends web site the other day and it took a little while to load. Looked at a reasonably small image and it was nearly a 1mb, in which case it should have been no more than 250kb. But to answer you question I don't know, interesting to see what others say.

CoffeeCups Website Insight gives you a pretty good idea of page weight and load times. Give it a test run. http://www.coffeecup.com/website-insight/
Of course, you have to publish before you can find anything out. Server and internet connection means a lot. Just publish to a test directory, run Website Insight and it will point you to areas that you need to look at before a final publish.

http://gunsmoke.me/cloud/insight.png

Thanks guys.

I'm keeping my images pretty small (most are sub 100kb), so I'm hoping I'll be OK.

I think I'd better wait and see how this website turns out before I start buying web analysis tools, but thanks for the link Gunsmoke.