[Tarek007]

Question:
What is Speed and how is it measured?
Traffic and Site Stats

The Speed statistic is a measurement of the time it takes for pages on a site to load. It is based on load times experienced by Alexa users, and measured by the Alexa Toolbar, during their regular Web browsing.

The page load times can be affected by a number of factors, including the size and complexity of the documents, the responsiveness and location of the site's servers, and the Internet connection speeds of the site's typical users. Particular types of sites will generally load more quickly than others; those sites whose pages feature mostly text content will load more quickly, while e-commerce sites or other sites with personalization options for surfers will take longer to load the images and other non-text content. For shopping sites and other sites heavy on content, therefore, being categorized as slow alongside text-only sites is unavoidable.

The median of all load times observed for a page by all Toolbars having observed it is expressed in terms of a percentile relative to other pages' median load times. The percentile figure is a measure of how fast a site is relative to other measured sites. For example, a site in the 98th percentile (Very Fast) has a median load time faster than 98% of all measured sites, while a site in the 2nd percentile (Very Slow) loads more quickly than only 2% of all sites and is slower than 97% of all sites.

The Speed statistic is recalculated and refreshed monthly based on current data.