Another of my favourite performance tools for reducing every millisecond from loading times is Google Page Speed. Although it's a little fiddly to install (fiddly in the sense that it takes more than 30 seconds), it's still a brilliant extension to have for Chrome.
If you already have Chrome, take a look over at the
Page Speed site for what it brings to the table. The install notes and download links are available
here.
Again, I recommend using this in addition to certain other tools so that absolutely everything is covered. Other tools that you really should use are: -
Don't take everything that these tools say as gospel though. There are some things that you might absolutely need to load first, i.e. your JQuery JavaScript for example. And while I'm about JQuery, Page Speed also picked up errors in the code that aren't your fault and aren't easily correctable so you will get marked down for those. Other things in there are quite easy to correct, such as where you've specified an image but missed out the image dimensions for example. I managed to get my site up to 98/100 which I'm quite happy with.
Some of the recommendations that it will ask you to make include: -
- Minify HTML and JavaScript;
- Combine images into CSS sprites and avoid CSS @import;
- Optimise images and specify dimensions;
- Specify a character set;
- Put CSS in your document head;
I found that it made a small difference, but if that difference is your user sticking with you and the user going elsewhere, it could well be worth a small amount of your time. Oh and lastly, there is an online version of this available as well. Head over to
Page Speed Online and give your site a test. It should also be noted that there is a version available for Firefox versions 4 and above.
No comments:
Post a Comment