Tools to check the speed and performance of your website or mobile app.
The results screen can be a bit intimidating the first time you see it because there is a lot of information to consume but there are some key pieces of information to look at first.
Webpagetest.org is used by professional developers to test the performance of your site for free.
WebPagetest is a tool that was originally developed by AOL for use internally and was open-sourced in 2008 under a BSD license.
Monitor your website’s availability and performance for free with Pingdom and always be the first to know when your website is down. No installation required.
Testing and optimizing page speed is essential. Make use of the tools and techniques you can find on this website to optimize the performance of your website.
Web Page Performance Test of Omaha Code.
Each request for a piece of content on the page (image, javascript, css, flash, etc) needs to be made over a connection to the web server. Setting up new connections can take a lot of time so it is best to re-use connections when you can and keep-alive is the way that is done.
They are enabled by default on most configurations and are part of the HTTP 1.1 standard but there are times when they will be broken (sometimes unintentionally). Enabling keep-alives is usually just a configuration change on the server and does not require any changes to the page itself and can usually reduce the time to load a page by 40-50%.
Just about everything on a page that isn’t an image or video is text of some kind (html, javascript, css). Text compresses really well and HTTP provides a way to transfer the files in compressed form.
Enabling compression for text resources is usually just a server configuration change without requiring any changes to the page itself and can both improve the performance and reduce the costs of serving the content (by reducing the amount of data transmitted).
Since text resources are usually downloaded at the beginning of the page (javascript and css), delivering them faster has a much larger impact on the user experience than excessive bytes on images or other content.
The image compression check just looks at photo images (JPEG files) and makes sure the quality isn’t set too high. JPEG images can usually be compressed pretty substantially without any noticeable reduction in visual quality.
We use a standard of compressing the images at a quality level of “50” in Photoshop’s “Save for Web” mode but generally you should compress them as much as you can before they start to look bad.
It’s also not uncommon for other data to be included in photos, particularly if they came from a digital camera (information about the camera, lens, location, even thumbnail images) and some of that should be removed from images before being published to a web page (be careful to retain any copyright information).