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Warning: I know up front that this is a question asking both for resources and opinions. Ideally, feedback/answers could address the spirit of the question, rather than shout it down. By spirit of the question, I mean feedback could suggest keywords or broader/narrower ways to ask that would help me and other users with similar questions understand the underlying concepts of this question.

Back in the day (circa 2010) when I used to work a help desk at a university, when someone came in reporting issues with slow internet, we would run one of many online network speed tests (like speakeasy or something similar) to establish a baseline of what "slow" looked like before troubleshooting.

After any changes that we thought would improve network speed, we would run the same speed test again, and assuming it had the positive results we were hoping for, we would then do a few "real world" speed tests. At the time, this constituted visiting some known slow-to-load ("heavy") websites like:

  • cnn.com
  • pitchforkmedia.com

These would give both the user and the support agent some confidence that the increase in throughput wasn't just in a test environment. If the user thought puppiesandkittens.com was slow to load before, but it was a relatively light page to begin with, going to this page again after making changes wouldn't really demonstrate that all sites would load faster.

Is there any sort of directory of pages that are slower-to-load due to network demands that can be checked as a sort of "real world" speed test beyond the dedicated 'download one file, upload one file' online speed tests out there?

Note that I'm not looking to stir up any trouble either, ie to encourage everyone to list their favorite slow site in some disparaging way. There could be a lot of legit reasons some sites require more bandwidth than others. But relying only on tight lab-condition sites that do one or two requests isn't going to give a real impression of the network speed compared to actually seeing a page in the wild deal with tons of graphics, content, streaming, etc.

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  • The problem here is that you are discussing “speed” as a whole, but then narrowly assuming that speed is directly related to network performance. On the contrary. These “slow” to load websites will almost never have anything to do with the internet connection and everything to do with the software and processing power of the computer. If you want to know why or if a computer is performing slowly, you’ve got a lot further to go than your perception of how fast a website loads. Each component of “slow” needs to be measured discreetly to form a complete picture. Jun 13, 2018 at 3:35
  • Personally I understand that users complain about slow sites, but as a sysadmin and network administrator I only care about factors I can control. I can collect useful metrics for bandwidth, latency and usage of the LAN and internet connections and (recommend to) buy upgrades based on that. The performance or lack thereof for an individual crappy web site is not a useful metric and in the end only the problem of the site owner and not mine...
    – HBruijn
    Jun 13, 2018 at 8:50

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