Ask HN: Tools for site Optimization | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tools for site Optimization

3 pointsradagaisus3 comments

I work at a big organization. Some of the web development is leaded by me and some is outsourced to another big organization.

They built our official site and it's awful. Sometimes, and I'm not kidding, it can take up to 20 seconds to load!

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.

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.

Any ideas?

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.

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

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

http://www.webpagetest.org/

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