06/06/2009

How can you can make your site run faster? Google has launched a firefox extension called Page Speed which webmasters can use to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed is available as  an open-source Firefox Add-on. However it requires another addon to work called Firebug, which integrates with Firefox and lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Page Speed will perform several tests on your web server configuration and front-end code based on a set of best practices for improved web page performance, and will then provide helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance. It will not only make your site faster, but also reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.

Here is how a sample site speed test error report looks like

We gave page speed a try on our site and were able to identify some page slowing issues. Some complex issues identified were to leverage browser caching, minimize DNS lookups, serve static content from a cookieless domain, minimize cookie size etc. It included some simple tips also like specify image dimensions, and use efficient CSS selectors.

While you give your site a try with Google Page Speed, you can also check out Yahoo! Yslow, another Firefox extension that works with Firebug to identify website speed performance issues.

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