One of the tools I use most often in my day to day web hosting work is Pingdom Tools. The full page test that they provide is second to none when it comes to an awesome way to see what might be slowing a web page down. They also have ping and traceroute tools too, to help any webmaster see where the bottleneck might be with your web site’s loading time.

Full Page Test

The full page test gives you stats and information from images, CSS, javascripts, RSS, flash, frames and more. It gives you a visual representation of how the page is loaded in any web browser. Every test also shows statistics about the web site in question such as the number of objects, total loading time and the size of the objects.

Ping and Traceroute Tools

These two tools you have seen time and time again on all kinds of different network tool web sites. The difference between what Pingdom does in comparison with everybody else is their visual representation is a lot easier to understand. With pinging it gives you 5 tests to look at, as they ping the web site in question and then it takes an average of the scores. The traceroute tool gives you the number of hops, the max response time and the average response time as long as a neat bar graph visualization of it all.

This is one URL that any hosting worker or webmaster should have tucked away on their tool belt.