We are working on a performance project at work. One of the marketing guys wrote a blog post for our customers that talked about improving website performance. There is a lot of talk about performance going on at the company. One of the drivers of this talk is the desire to satisfy visitors with a fast responsive website. Another reason to jump on the performance bandwagon is Google’s commitment to a faster internet and backing up the philosophy with a change to the page rank algorithm to add page speed as a factor in where your site sits in search results. Lastly, we just want to be competitive. Beating the performance of the competition is just another notch on the belt and another battle won in the fight for market share. So, to keep visitors happy, maintain top 10 in the Google SERP (search engine result page), and to stay competitive, our site has to be fast.

If you call yourself a professional web developer and haven’t heard of YSlow, I’d have to put your title to the test. Well the author of YSlow, Steve Souder, is my web performance hero. He has done many talks, wrote books, blogged, and basically evangelized the importance of frontend or client side performance. I just watched a video of Steve at a Google Tech Talk where he reviewed the guidance you get from YSlow. YSlow is a tool that helps you identify areas to improve the performance of your website. In fact, Steve wrote a book, High Performance Websites, that provides details of the guidance given by this tool. The guidance started with 14 rules on Yahoo, but has since been expounded upon by his new book, Even Faster Websites. The original 14 rules are:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an expires header
4. GZip components
5. Put stylesheets at the top
6. Put scripts at the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make AJAX cacheable

Steve has since moved from Yahoo to Google and it would be expected that Google now has a performance guidance tool too, Page Speed. Not sure if Steve had anything to do with this, but it makes sense if he did. Along with guidance for improving performance Page Speed also has a tool to measure website performance. Both tools are available as a Firebug and Chrome plugin.

Here are some other tools and you can check my other posts for more:

• gtmetrix.com – GTmetrix uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow to grade your site’s performance and provides actionable recommendations to fix these issues. This tool also allows you to compare you site against other pages (maybe your competitors).
• www.webpagetest.org – Pagetest allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested. The test will be conducted from the geographic location you specify and you will be provided a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist. One cool thing about this tool is the video that it produces of your web page load. You can actually produce a video comparing your page to other pages.
• websiteoptimization.com – Enter a URL below to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

So, if you develop or manage a website, make sure you jump on the performance bandwagon, get familiar with the tools that can help you improve performance, and checkout some of the people defining website performance optimization. Improving performance can take a little time, but it is probably one of the cheapest and effective improvements you can make to your website.

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