As you could probably guess since Performance is one of the six site categories around here, I’m a fan of WebPageTest. You can imagine my reaction to the news that page load videos are now available from the service.
From Recording video with WebPagetest:
One of the things we like to look at is what a page looks like when it is loading, particularly if you are comparing a before and after or multiple sites to each other. This is particularly helpful when talking to the business about performance and sometimes the raw load times don’t adequately represent the user experience.
Up until now this has been a pretty manual process where we screen record a video while loading a site then load it up into Premiere and stitch it together.
Starting today, you can have WebPagetest record a video of a page load directly. It’s still in a pretty rough form and it’s going to be a while before it’ll be ready for the masses but what is there is already pretty powerful and extremely flexible.
Very cool. I can think of two or three presentations where video of page load would have been super useful and will definitely find a use for the feature in the near future.