Website Optimizing Tools
Page load times are being taken into Google’s search result so it’s more important than ever to get your pages/site to load as quickly as possible in an efficient manner. This also benefits users and especially mobile browsers. Here are a few tools to help increase webpage improvements and tracking tools.
Google Analytics
This is a must have monitoring feature. All that is required is a Google account (with Analytics) and copying and pasting the code into your website. With modern CRMs, the code can be written once to a template and every time a page is severed, it will be included to track web statistics to all the pages using the same template. Analytics will help identify users and associated information such as the origin of the user, the OS and browser they are using and more. This really does give a good indication of who and what type of people visit your site and how many people over a given period. Go http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account.
Webpage Test
Tests the loading times of a first view (no cached data) and repeat views (viewing with cached data). It gives a good indication of how and which parts are taking a long time to load. For example I found that the Twitter “widget” is the longest part to load but it queries Twitter’s website to get the last tweet I made. There is nothing I can do to improve that except for removing it. Webpage Test also breaks down into details how long each external elements takes to load which includes external javascript and CSS files, images and iframes. Webpage test is very easy to use and it can be found at http://www.webpagetest.org At least one speed test should be performed to test page load times but there are other tools around which give different information and different types of load tests.
mod_pagespeed
PageSpeed is a Google made Apache module which increases page load times by changing a few things on the server side before it is sent to the client/browser. These include minifying files to adding expiration and caching settings. The nature of the module means it needs to be installed on the server side or the hosting provider needs to support it for example DreamHost. Enabling the module, dannytsang.co.uk went from a loading time of 13 seconds to 8 seconds using Chrome and with a clean cache. PageSpeed takes out a lot of manual Apache configuration settings out and does it automatically. The module is open source and can be found at http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com
