I received several email responses to the previous post on Google Apps – Free Business Email Hosting. Some readers were wondering how to know if their e-commerce site is fast enough. Here, I will outline a simple method to benchmark the performance of your web server.

Site owners are concerned if their web servers are fast enough for their customers. To those who run e-commerce sites with shopping cart, how quickly a web page loads up is very important to your visitors.

So How Do You Know If Your e-Commerce Site Is Fast Enough?

You can do this simple benchmark test.

1. Clear or delete all your browser cache.
If you do not know how to clear your browser cache, view these video tutorials:

2. Load up your e-commerce website.
(Time it with a stopwatch if you have to.)

3. Load up Amazon.com.

If you feel your website loads up as fast as Amazon.com then you are ok.

You can also compare the loading time of your site vs your competitors’.

If your web server is slow to response, then you may want to see if your mail server(and anti-virus software) is taking up valuable CPU/RAM resources and consider migrating your email to Google Apps to improve the performance of your web server without upgrading any existing hardware.