
Website load and speed analyzer - warrenm
https://varvy.com/pagespeed/
======
dbg31415
What does this tool do that others haven't already done?

* [https://tools.pingdom.com/](https://tools.pingdom.com/)

* [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

* [https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/s...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/staticscan/)

* [https://observatory.mozilla.org/](https://observatory.mozilla.org/)

* [https://securityheaders.io/](https://securityheaders.io/)

* [https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly](https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly)

I'm sure there are a lot of others...

~~~
janesvilleseo
On that note, GTMetrix just did a great write up comparing a few
[https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix-
pa...](https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix-pagespeed-
insights-pingdom-tools-and-webpagetest/)

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pmlnr
Getting rid of image metadata is _not_ optimization, that is simple
information loss. I hate it when speed tests tell m the progressive jpgs are
not optimized because they have EXIF; EXIF is part of the image.

~~~
ShirsenduK
What is the use of metadata of an image while rendering an image on a webpage?

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Its not uncommon to download images from a website in general, however more
specifically I know my mother - an avid photographer - uses a plugin to
inspect metadata to find how and where a photo was taken.

~~~
ShirsenduK
That is not the typical use case. As web engineers one of our goals is to make
websites faster. Speed is a very important UX.

Also unless you have a fast website, people will drop off your site and google
won't rank you. No point of having great images with good EXIF data if people
never see the image.

For photography websites, it does make sense to keep it but in general no
point wasting those extra bytes which add upto GBs in wasted bandwidth.

~~~
conradk
I disagree that as web engineers, our goal is to make websites faster. Our
goal is to make a website that suits the customer's needs.

Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request
before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made
stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore
and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.

Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care
about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But
otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your
website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching,
reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting
icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of
Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of
magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't
remove that useful information from images.

~~~
ShirsenduK
Wow! I primarily work on consumer facing web products where speed does play a
big part but glad to know where you are coming from. I have not had such
request or perspective. :) Thanks for sharing your experience.

Agree, that its not the first thing you should focus on. But saying you should
not do it is what I was protesting.

When you run your site through speed analysis tools like the site posted or
WebPageTest(my favourite), you do get a set of tasks based on priority and
removing exif data is generally low and I am not advocating against that.

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TekMol
Seems to be wrong about caching.

Tells me:

    
    
        Browser caching not enabled for all resources.
    

And then gives an example of a file that is delivered with this cache header:

    
    
        Cache-Control:max-age=3600
    

Also it seems to put DNS resolv time into the "Server response time". So if
you get "Slow server response time" that might be something that is happening
between this service, it's DNS provider and your Nameserver. Then when you try
it again, suddenly it's "Fast server response time" because DNS caching took
place.

~~~
theandrewbailey
That Cache-Control header specifies one hour. My resources specify a month or
two, and the tool doesn't complain about any.

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TheAceOfHearts
IMO, inlining styles is rarely worth it. Just include a single CSS file in the
head and call it a day. There's value in simplicity.

If I'm given the choice, I usually avoid web fonts. Most platform's built-in
fonts are usually pretty good and fast. It's fine for a website to look
different on various browsers and operating systems.

~~~
ShirsenduK
When your CSS file gets large. Which is the case in most sites today thanks to
frameworks like Bootstrap. Your page will wait for the CSS file to download,
process and repaint. Inlining some of the CSS i.e. critical path CSS can give
you lighting fast renders.

~~~
jameskegel
Also don't forget to strip your unused classes, which I'm embarrassed to
admit, I did not start doing until recently

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mrb
It incorrectly reports that browser caching is "Not enabled for third party
resources" on my site: [http://blog.zorinaq.com](http://blog.zorinaq.com)

It gives absolutely zero details about why it thinks it's not enabled, and
does not say which are the affected "third party resources"... As a matter of
fact I only have 1 third party resource
([https://fonts.googleapis.com/](https://fonts.googleapis.com/)) and it
properly sets Expires and Cache-Control...

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thegeekpirate
I've used [http://yellowlab.tools](http://yellowlab.tools) religiously in the
past, glad to see more solutions coming about.

Although it is frightening that we need these in the first place, to be
honest.

~~~
jklinger410
Varvy is not new. It used to be feedthebot and has been operating like it is
now without any updates for a least 2 years. Maybe longer.

~~~
thegeekpirate
Ah gotcha, thanks for letting me know.

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donohoe
Ok - it works and I get a nice report.

Does this offer anything more than WebPageTest.org, Google Pagespeed, or
auditing in Chrome?

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thepratt
Would be good to be able to kickstart the process via a query string, i.e.
varvy.com?q=[https://my.url](https://my.url)

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shimon_e
I hate how all of these tools complain about google fonts. This looks like
Google's page speed tool with a nicer UI.

~~~
vortico
I think all the tools are trying to tell you something. Using fonts is in fact
the largest dependency with many websites.

~~~
shimon_e
I specify only the characters I use in custom fonts. I budget no more than
30kb to fonts when making a website.

These tools complain that Google font's css is only cached for 2 hours. Which
is something none of us can control. Even Google's own page speed tool
complains about this. I get perfect scores in everything but Google fonts so
it sticks out like an eye score.

~~~
GrumpyNl
Cant you serv them from your own server?

~~~
shimon_e
Google does optimisations based on user agent. Ilya Grigorik does not
recommend hosting the fonts from your own server.

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hardwaresofton
Hey UI point - you might want to set a consistent height for those grid
elements in the list -- would do a lot to make the elements more consistently
laid out.

It looks like the individual tiles vary in about 2-4 lines for the below-title
description text, so I fiddled around for a bit, and it looks like this is
just about right:

    
    
      .card {
          height: 25em;
      }
    

Of course, if you're going to set the height of the card you should probably
go in and set the heights (in em or percentage) of the children elements, etc.

(just noticed the results page cards are a lot bigger, so probably scope that
rule down to only the cards on the landing page)

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morley
I noticed the site is reporting JS and CSS sizes AFTER gzip, not before. That
seems unnecessary. Browsers will download the compressed version, so it's the
compressed version that determines the page speed.

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ARCarr
What are you supposed to do about image alt text when the image is purely
decorative, like a border?

This complains about alt="".

~~~
wbkang
Some people would say use a div and background image CSS property. Not sure if
that's the recommended solution though.

~~~
sdoering
Well - I would try to omit the image at all and use border style properties to
do it. This way I would omit an request totally.

But maybe someone with real experience (not some hobbyist when it comes to
front end work) should chime in.

~~~
amichal
Per
[https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/img](https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/img)

> A purely decorative image that doesn't add any information In general, if an
> image is decorative but isn't especially page-specific, for example an image
> that forms part of a site-wide design scheme, the image should be specified
> in the site's CSS, not in the markup of the document. However, a decorative
> image that isn't discussed by the surrounding text but still has some
> relevance can be included in a page using the img element. Such images are
> decorative, but still form part of the content. In these cases, the alt
> attribute must be present but its value must be the empty string.

I have always understood that (and earlier spec incarnations) to mean that
<img alt=''> is correct for these cases.

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erik_p
Many of these recommendations are at odds with HTTP/2 recommendations,
practices.

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ShirsenduK
WebPageTest offers more actionable insights. Chrome Developer Tools and Google
PageSpeed offer almost the same features.

------
mattbgates
[http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)

It probably blocked you but it's been over 5 minutes...
[https://www.screencast.com/t/CFkwelblQ](https://www.screencast.com/t/CFkwelblQ)

