You can certainly use a stopwatch to time your site, but doing so is actually a bad idea. Your browser may store graphics and other items in its cache to decrease load times on subsequent visits, so a stopwatch may not provide an accurate indication of how long a page really takes to load for the first time visitors. Better tools are available. My favourite is Pingdom Tools at tools.pingdom.com, where you type the URL of the site or page you want to test and click the Test Now button. Pingdom Tool tests the page and displays the total time required for it to appear on the screen. Results also include a chart that displays the loading time for each object on the page, useful for identifying bandwidth hogs. If your site seems slow, it’s imortant to assess what is slowing it down. Fortunately, a couple of other free tools can help. To get started,you’ll need to install the following on your computer:
- Mozilla Firefox web browser
- Firebug
- Page Speed or YSlow
To test a page, open it in Firefox, click Tools Firebug, Open Firebug and then click the Page Speed or YSlow tab and click Analyze Performance (for Page Speed) or Grade(for YSlow). Both the tools list factors that contribute to site speed, flag areas that need improvement and provide recommendations for fixing problems.
BUILDING FOR SPEED
Both You can do a number of things right now to speed the performance of your website, including:
- Keep it simple. Don’t let window dressing slow your site.
- Combine Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) into a single file.
- Streamline your CSS by eliminating all unused styles.
- If your site is running on a blogging platform, install a caching plug-in.
- Trim images whenever possible.
- Specify image dimensions.
- Use CSS Sprites to combine background images into a single file.
- Avoid flash-based websites
- Move your website from shared to dedicated server or choose a more dependable, higher quality hosting service.
- Use a content delivery network such as Akamai Technologies to deploy contents across geographically distributed networks.
