When doing some initial, rough performance evaluation of a website's code, we can use some common tools which should be available on most desktops. Whether on Mac or Windows, you should have access to a command line (Terminal on Mac, git bash or Cygwin bash on Windows) with the regular "Unix" (POSIX) command line tools or GNU versions of them. You should also have 'curl' (and 'wget'), which is non-standard but very common and useful.
In the following examples, replace example.com with your website and page you want to test.
Step 0: ping example.com
...