Using Page Speed and Best Practices for Increasing Site Performance

Speeding up your website is a daunting task, especially if you don’t have any experience with editing the code. Each element of your site adds time to the page’s loading time. It might not appear like it at first, but each addition creates the impression that your site takes a long time to load.

As more people access sites through mobile devices, including blogs, the page loading time increases due to slower network speeds. Having code that is optimized makes the experience of your users more pleasing, while your hosting provider can better manage your site when you aren’t using as much resources per visitor.

Learning the basics of optimizing your site shouldn’t be a hard process. That’s why Google released Page Speed. The add-on is compatible with Firefox 3.5 and requires Firebug 1.4 or higher. It can be used on Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows XP and higher.

Using the Extension

You will need some background on using Firefox extensions and some basics on coding before you can really get the most out of the service. First of all, you’ll need Firebug installed before you can proceed with the Page Speed extension.

Once it has been installed, go to the main Firebug interface using the link in the bottom of the window or through the Firefox Tools menu. Next, click “Page Speed” in the Firebug window and then “Analyze Performance.” This process will analyze everything on the page and produce a report that you can use to increase the page loading speed.

For example, your report might contain: enable GZIP compression, leverage browser caching, combine external JavaScript, etc. It will sort the results by the best method of increasing speed, as well as determining what you are doing right.

Best Practices for Performance

Within the site, several tips have been provided for decreasing the page loading time of your site. They include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Optimizing Caching – Keep your site’s data and logic off the network altogether. This involves moving infrequently used files to other services, off-site.
• Minimizing Round-Trip Times – The time it takes for a client to send a request and the server to send a response over the network can be done through minimizing DNS lookups and minimizing redirects.
• Minimizing Request Size – With each sending of an HTTP request, all associated cookies have to be sent, so you want to minimize cookie size, serve static content from a cookie-less domain, or use other approaches to reduce the request size.
• Minimize Payload Size – Reduce the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages.
• Optimize Browser Rendering – Improve the layout of a page, ideally using efficient CSS selectors, avoiding CSS expressions, and putting CSS in the document head.

Remember that even basic techniques, such as specifying image dimensions can certainly help in reducing the page loading time of your sites.

Ongoing Page Speed Problems

The key in increasing page speed of your site is providing your visitors a faster-loading experience. While broadband isn’t yet available in all areas, you want to provide a fast-loading site across all connections. Through the reduction of file sizes, you can also decrease your bandwidth bill (or your hosting package). This is a part of an ongoing initiative by Google to help speed up and improve the web.

The Firebug Add-on can be found here, while the Page Speed Tool can be found here.