I’m pleased to announce a major upgrade to WebWait, the first big upgrade since I launched the site 2.5 years ago. It’s based on watching how people are using it, talking about it, and sending me direct feedback about it. Thanks to all who have provided feedback.

The new features are:

  • Multiple sites You can keep typing in new URLs and hitting "Add". This will put them in a queue of sites to eventually be benchmarked. (I decided against a big textarea where you could type in all URLs at once; this would be confusing to the majority of WebWait users, who are casual visitors wanting to check out the time for their own site.)
  • Stats Average, median, and standard deviation for each website, in a summary table. Indeed, the summary table is the cultural centre for all these new features - when you queue up a site, it's immediately added to the table.
  • Export The export feature seems to be popular in List Of Tweets. I took the same UI concept and applied it here, so you can export data in plain text, HTML, and CSV format. The CSV is especially interesting as one of the people who've given me feedback is a statistician who's planning to run analysis on some data.
  • Call Data View times for each individual call.
  • Expand/Collapse Call Data You can choose whether to show call data or not. Collapsing call data gives you a neat overview of stats for each domain.
  • Delete You can delete individual call data, or delete an entire website record. This is useful for outlier data; for example, you can see how fast the site loads from your browser cache, by turning browser cache on and deleting just the first call in the sequence.
  • Stats Average, median, and standard deviation for each website.
  • Browser compatibility. WebWait didn't work upon launch in Safari, but it does now work in recent versions of Safari (I think a change in 3.0 made it work again :)), and works fine in Chrome too. This is important for users testing how their website loads in different browsers.

Thanks for reading. As always, let us know what you think of the site and anything else you’d like to see.

Table with expanded results:

Table with collapsed results:

Export results data (text):

Export results data (HTML):

Export results data (CSV):