

Ask HN: Tools for site Optimization - radagaisus

I work at a big organization. Some of the web development is leaded by me and some is outsourced to another big organization.<p>They built our official site and it's awful. Sometimes, and I'm not kidding, it can take up to 20 seconds to load!<p>The people who are responsible for our official site are non techie. When they tell the company that built the site that it is slow the company blames the server company, and when they go to the server company they blame the dev company.<p>I need proofs and hard numbers that I can give the people in charge about what things slow down the site. E.g. the background image is 500kb and I have smush.it to prove that it's slow. The JavaScript isn't compressed and is at the top of the page, etc.<p>Any ideas?
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cmarshall
You can use tools in your browser such as FireBug <http://getfirebug.com/> or
YSlow <http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/> , which will show the time it takes
to download each component using your connection.

There's also tools such as this <http://tools.pingdom.com/> from Pingdom
that'll show the same figures from an independent network link.

From there, look at how long it takes to receive the HTML (not including any
of the images, CSS or JS), if that's slow then it's likely that the web server
is taking a long time to render the templates server side (it could also be
due to a really slow connection...)

If most of the time is spend downloading a lot of images, CSS or JS then YSlow
will highlight this and the areas that should be improved. YSlow will also
highlight any issues you might have with not setting cache headers correctly.

If the site doesn't contain excessive images, CSS or JS, then the connection
might be slow, the 500kb background image will give you a decent indication of
the connection speed, though something bigger would be better.

Also, if you have access to the logs then most web frameworks will log out the
time taken to render each page on the server.

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tnorthcutt
<http://gtmetrix.com>

Google's page speed service:
<https://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/tryit.html>

<http://code.google.com/speed/pss/index.html>

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funthree
<http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/>

<http://www.webpagetest.org/>

