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Page speed tools
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Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task.
Thanks...
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If you're using wordpress or a CMS of some type, look for posts and tools related to that particular software. The SmushIt tool is available as a wordpress plugin, and it will compress pictures on upload, and will compress (on demand) pictures in the media library.
I use Irfanview for batch resizing images (in the same directory).
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Have you considered using a CDN? This will cache your site in multiple locations so end users site experience will be better.
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YSlow for firebug is very useful, don't forget to run SmushIt (Tools in YSlow) to have optimized images. Spites + GZip + 1 single packed CSS + 1 single packed JS + expires headers are very effective. Use media domain if you have a lot of pictures on the page.
See the real load time in the Net tab of firebug as Gary said.
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I have gone through this same process recently.
FireBug's NET tab, the page speed plugin and Yahoo YSlow plugins were the way to go.
I had a page load time of about 10 seconds before optimising. I reduced this to about 6 seconds by doing the following:
- Using different domain names (e.g. static.mysite.com, static2.mysite.com, static3.mysite.com) to increase parallel downloads of CSS/images etc.
- Gzip
- Reducing size of all images
I then managed to decrease this further to about 1.5 seconds by changing server hosts.
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decrease size of your pictures by 30% in most cases you wont even see the difference, but it helps a lot with load time.
Also check if you have any errors: http://validator.w3.org/ and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Good Luck.
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yslow for firefox
and good old Google Webmaster Tools
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