Previously, I wrote about a very useful add-on for Firefox called YSlow, that helped me decrease the load speed of my blog by almost 50%. You can use YSlow to analyze all the components of your web page to find out what aspects can be improved to increase website performance overall.
YSlow is great, but it was the only tool that really did a good job of analyzing many aspects of your website, such as content, cookies, CSS, images, Javascript, etc.
Page Speed is a very similar tool from Google that also is an add-on to Firefox. You will also need Firebug installed before being able to use it, just like for YSlow.
Page Speed evaluates the performance of your web pages and they gives you suggestions on how to improve the speed and performance of your website. You can use it to make your website faster and reduce your bandwidth usage.
Once you install Page Speed, go to View in Firefox and choose Firebug. Click on the Page Speed tab and click the Analyze Performance button to get started.
Wait a few seconds and you’ll get an overall performance summary of your website like below:
Anything checked green is considered fine and requires no change. Anything with a yellow exclamation is considered important and anything with a red exclamation is considered urgent.
Basically, there are a set of performance best practices that Google has come up with and that are tested in Page Speed, including:
- Optimize website caching
- Minimize round trip times
- Minimize overall request size
- Minimize payload size
- Optimize browser rendering
The tool is pretty cool because you can expand each item and see exactly what you need to fix. For example, I need to specify image dimensions and remove unused CSS:
It even tells you what CSS is not being used, so you can easily remove it from your stylesheet! Note that it shows you what CSS is not being used on the current page, which means that some of the items may be used on another page, so be careful.
Other optimizations that it checks for includes gzip compression, deferred loading of JavaScript, combining external CSS and JavaScript files, minifying JavaScript, minimizing DNS lookups, using a CDN and lots more.
You can also click on Page Speed Activity and see how each component is being loaded in a nice graph:
Overall, it’s a great tool for webmasters or anyone who simply wants to analyze why their websites are running slow. Check it out! [via Twitter]
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