Google have released a tool called Page Speed as an open source project. The tool will help you to improve the performance of your web pages. Page Speed is a Firefox add-on that is integrated to Firebug. If you develop websites or web applications and do not use Firebug then I recommend you check it out. You can edit, debug and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript in real-time on any web page.

Google have been using Page Speed internally to improve the performance of web pages. Page Speed will evaluate the performance of a website and provide you with suggestions on how you can improve the performance. The suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted front end best practices for website development. Google has provided documentation on these best practices including the rationale behind each of them.

I used Page Speed to analyse the performance of the webpayments.ie homepage and the overall performance summary was "Significant performance improvements are possible".

I am impressed with the quality of the tool. Not only does it highlight where the performance gaps are but it also suggests how you can fix them. For example for the webpayments.ie frontpage it indicates that there are 236.2kB worth of images and that optimizing them could save approximately 89.9kB. What impresses me is that the tool actually provides the compressed images.

I recommend installing Page Speed and trying it out on your website. If you can make some small changes that can cause your website to load and display faster then you will be improving the user's experience. If you are selling online then anything that you can do to improve your user's experience is good.

Dave.

--

If you liked this article then you should subscribe to our Blog RSS feed.