After my annual hiatus to review HTML editors, I'm back with all new cheap and free software for web designers. For the start of the new year, I've decided to start out by showing you a great tool for checking your page speed. Speeding up web pages is getting more and more important even your SEO efforts can be negatively affected by slow pages. I hope you like this software, and if you know of other tools I should feature in my software pick of the week, let me know about them.

Knowing how fast your web page loads is the first step to making it faster. And this testing tool gives your pages a grade in various categories for improving speed. What I like best is that it does two downloads of your site - and tells you how fast it loads on the second time as well as the first. This helps you understand how repeat visitors are seeing your page. While it's important to get that first download as fast as possible, if subsequent downloads are slow your readers won't want to keep coming back.

• Check Page Speed: WebPageTest
• How to Speed Up Web Pages
• "Thank You for Your Patience"
• The Size of Your Pages
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

Web Design Software Pick of the Week: WebPageTest originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 00:32:41.

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