Why am i receiving two different speed reports for my site

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi i am a bit puzzled. i am optimizing my site to speed it up but i am getting two different speed reports.

my site is www.in2town.co.uk and the two speed websites i am using are

http://tools.pingdom.com  and http://gtmetrix.com

Can anyone please let me know what results they are getting for my site with the two above tools and also why i am getting two different results.

the other day before i made some changes, i was getting on average 2 seconds for loading speed, but at the moment, sometimes i am getting seven seconds and then when i test it again it goes down to three seconds or below.

Also, does anyone know how i can test to make sure that my site is faster when you go from one page to another on my site.

I am not getting the true loading experience on my site from one page to another because good old virgin are updating their broadband in our area and we have also had voltage problem, whatever this means on our broadband box outside on our street which they claim they have sorted.

any help would be great

[brandonjschwartz]

Could be a few things.

1. The scoring is different between the two tools. I looked and couldn't find any specifics on their API's, but they could place weight on different factors. In the second tool, it looks like the first tab is from Google's page speed tool since the second is Yahoo's. The scores between the two were different.

2. The location where the test is done can impact speed. The closer the testing server is to the server that the website is hosted on, the faster the load time will be.

3. Could be a difference in caching? If your site has flushed its cache, the load time can be slower while the server re-caches things, then it will be faster later. This usually isn't the case, but I've seen it happen.

As for your second question, I'm not sure of a definite way. If your caching is working properly, it should just happen... Hope that helps.