If you own a website and you are thinking of a method to know the average speed of your website, then the solution is the webmaster's tool from Google which will measure your site's performance.

The performance overview is a graph based on the aggregated speed of website. This is done by measuring the time to load the most frequently used pages of your website by visitors who has the Google toolbar with the facility of PageRank activated.

With the help of the data collected from the Google toolbar, the Google webmaster tool will provide you the performance graph for your location only. Let us say that your website is based in Spain. Then the webmaster's tool will provide you with the graph based on the users of Spain only.

Another important aspect of the Google webmaster tool is that it will also show the number of your visitors who are using high speed broadband or fast internet connection. One problem with the webmaster tool is that if most of your visitors do not use Google toolbar that the graph will not provide you the full story of your website's performance.

This tool will also provide you with information regarding average and aggregated load time of different web pages of your website. These times are based on the times the visitors of your website need to encounter. These numbers may vary for different users using different web browsers and using slow internet connections. The numbers will also reflect which webpage(s) of your website is slowing down your website.

Since the performance of your website is based on the time required by the users, thus your website's performance will also be affected by pages which you have barred from crawling. As it is not possible for search engines to crawl pages that you have disallowed, it will affect the users experience for your website.

You are required to check the load times of your users consistently. If there is a sudden spike in it, which means the load time has increased. If the load times are consistently on the higher side, then the reason behind this is that either the users are using sloe net connections or your webpage(s) are loading at a slower speed than usual. You would then require checking the webpage(s) of your website to see it is slowing down your website or not.

If the webpage is not loading at normal speeds you are required to let the Google webmaster tool to solve the problem. The webmaster tool would require using your page along with your resources to provide you the analysis. If not, then Google webmaster tool will not be able to provide you the complete analysis. Other than this if the servers provide them with contents which are even slightly modified, and then it will not show the proper assessment.

Sometimes from issues like a third party code for example website's analytic scripts, one thing that can affect the performance is the wide spread use of these analytic scripts.

If the analytic scripts are very common on the web, then the possibilities of the user to have browser that will have the cashed DNS lookup and script contents are very high. Though these scripts can be said to separate from DNS lookups, but in reality they generally do not have much influence on the load time.

So the Google webmaster tool is a good tool that will properly assess your website's loading time and not only that, it also has got suggestions for you to improve the load time that would assist your users. The tool will also help you to recognize the blocking issues and to modify them to improve the total loading time.