How to Measure Webpage Download Time and Size Using Python

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to download a webpage, or how big the webpage is? Measuring the time taken to download a webpage and its size is an important aspect of optimizing webpage performance and troubleshooting slow webpage loading. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to use Python to measure the time taken to download webpages and their size. By using the urllib and time modules and defining a WebPage class, you'll be able to easily download and measure multiple webpages, and then use the results to analyze webpage performance and troubleshoot slow webpage loading. Whether you're a web developer or simply curious about how webpages work, this blog post will provide valuable insights into webpage performance and optimization.

Setting up the Python Script

To get started, we need to import two Python modules: urllib for downloading the contents of webpages, and time for measuring the time taken to download webpages. Here's the code to import these modules:

import urllib
from time import perf_counter

Next, we need to define a WebPage class to encapsulate the logic for downloading and measuring webpages. Here are the attributes we'll use to represent a webpage: