Website speed analysis 15 comments

We think that most of the web pages are not fast enough, or, in other words, for almost all the sites there is room for improvement and we don’t mean that they have to change their hosting, to buy more servers, installing some unhelpful programs or other expensive things. These may or may not be necessary. We think that first you have to review your website from the speed test perspective.

For webmasters we suggest to try Page Speed by Google Code. This tool is currently an extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome but in the future we think will be available for other web browsers. This addon analyzes the Page Performance and gives it a score in terms of speed performance – telling you what and where you have speed optimization mistakes or notes.

Also on SeoAnalyzer.net top menu, under the "Speed" section will find some external free website speed checker tools, which we think that are great for anyone. They are very easy to use, but in some ways, analyzing the results may be a little more difficult.

Where to keep your eyes on?

For small to medium websites (presentation web pages, blogs, small online services, generally websites without a huge traffic), we think you must focus on some things when you do the speed analysis, ordered on the list below by importance and skills to do this:

1. Number of requests

We believe that optimizing the total number of objects by reducing it may be one of the most effective ways when we talk about Speed. Reducing the number of objects may be difficult and very difficult in many cases, especially if you don't have any solid knowledge about Web Design technologies! So we categorize the requests in several stages:

1.1. Combine external JavaScript files – Often it’s impossible to combine all your website JS scripts in a single one, mainly because you use external JS scripts (Facebook JS scripts). Sometimes when you combine the JSs you can get some disputes. Our suggestion is to combine all these files in the smallest number of files as possible. Also try to move the JavaScript files that don’t affect the render page in the footer (before closing the body HTML tag). A little example may be: 7 initial JS files by combining them may lead to => 2 in the head tag and 1 in the footer => minus 4 requests.

1.2. Combine the images used in the CSS and JS files – We recommend this method. Most of the websites and also good web designers don’t use this. Certainly it can be a little difficult but we advice to reduce the images request under 3, by combining all the used images in 1-3 bigger PNG8 images (when it’s not possible, PNG32). We’ve seen websites who have tens of image requests and then try to figure how the website speed performance will be improved by reducing this requests in a single one. The only disadvantage is that you need someone with solid CSS skills, but the final result is amazing (the page will load and render much faster).

1.3. Combine the CSS files – We don’t understand why others like to have more than 2 CSS files on their websites. It’s one of the easiest things to do if you want to reduce the file requests of a website.

1.4. Reduce the external requests – We’ve seen many websites that have tons of widgets, gadgets, ads, affiliate programs that only slow their websites. We think you must reconsider them, also we advice to use only reliable services. For example: Why to use more than one traffic tracking services? Just to compare them? We think a powerful one is enough.

2. Minimize the request size

As in all of our posts we try to use as little as possible technical data (can be difficult to understand for novices). Many of the top webmasters suggest us to constrain each website request under 1500 bytes. If you use cookies the suggestion is to keep their average size under 400 bytes. You can find more technical data on Google Code. But what are the most common and easy ways to minimize the request size?

2.1. Minify your Code - It’s very easy to minify the JavaScript | CSS | other scripts files. The internet is full with such free services and by minifying your external styles and scripts you can get considerably diminished file sizes. Also you can minify the HTML code of the page, but this in most cases may be difficult (there is some free software but we don’t recommend to try them). In rare cases minifying the website external files, may lead to some errors, so before putting them online, take a look at the pages.

2.2. Turn ON the Apache Compression - Enable the GZip compression will surely save bandwidth and speed up your website pages. The easiest way is to enable compression for the website static files (JavaScript, CSS files). You will find many online sources that explain you how to enable the GZip compression. The Apache Module mod_deflate (compression is lower but you save server performance) or mod_gzip (compression it’s higher but you lose server performance) allows to compress your website content before sending it to the client. We suggest to be careful, if it's your first time when you do this, you can get lost in details.

NOTE: Don’t use the compression for your website images. Not only has no effect but you’ll see a high usage of resources on your hosting plan.

2.3. Optimize your website Images - The latest rumor circulating is that modern browsers will load faster the PNGs than other image types like JPEG or GIF. We advice to make a quick review of your website images and see how you can optimize that by reducing their size (it’s not absolutely necessary to change their type).

Other website speed optimizing tips

We would be interested in hearing about your experience when trying to speed up web pages!