There are many different times where you may want to analyze how long a SharePoint site takes to load. Here are some steps you can take to help you do this efficiently.

We will use Microsoft Internet Explorer for all our tests as this is the only browser supported 100% by SharePoint.

There are two things to know which are important when testing your site load times. These are to do with the sites state. The very first time you visit a site, it will take a little longer then if you visit it again later that day because your browser caches or keeps some of the data it loaded earlier as a reference so that when you visit it again it loads even faster.

So your site can either be in a cached state or non-cached state. We all know how to load a site but if you want to ask a site to load as it would if it were the first time it was being accessed that day e.g. load in a non-cached state, there are two easy ways of asking a site to do this.
1. With your keyboard. Choose Ctrl + F5 and this will clear the cached data for the site and load all of the site data again.
2. In your internet options. You can simply clear your temporary internet files and this will remove all the cached data also.

Now that we understand a sites state, we can now look at analyzing its load speed in Internet Explorer. Here are the steps…

1. Start off by loading the site you want to analyze.
2. Press F12 on your keyboard to open the developer tools window.
3. I always like to have developer tools as a window of its own so I press Ctrl+P to unpin the window from the browser.
Note: There are many flavours of Internet Explorer in use at the moment. IE9, IE10, IE11. So the user interface will look a little different from one to another.
4. Now you are looking for the Network option on the left-hand side. Choosing Ctrl+4 will probably work too. This is normally presented with an icon which looks a little like a Wi-Fi image. You want to choose this.
5. You will see some controls at the top of the page. Choose the play or start button. This makes the tool listen for web requests.
6. Return to your browser and the site you opened earlier. Remember the sites state. You just opened it so its currently cached. Choose Ctrl+F5 on your keyboard.
7. Now, reference the results in the developer tools windows. See the column called Taken. Expand the column called URL so that you can see the complete url string. Take a screenshot of the results and name it Non-Cached.
8. To do one more test choose the option at the top of the developer tools results page to Clear all entries.
9. Return to your browser and the site you just tested. This time choose F5. This is testing the site in a cached state.
10. Reference the results in the developer tools windows. See the column called Taken. Take a screenshot of the results and name it Cached.

If your working with us on support and need to relay any of this type of information to us, the above may just help. You can send us both of the screenshots and we will have a better understanding of the issue you are experiencing.

Image credit