Page Speed - Analyze and Improve Your Website Performance

In today’s time it’s not only important to have a good website, but at the same time – it is also critical to ensure that the website is fast to load on the reader’s browser improving the overall visitor experience. Typically, once you are in the earlier phase of setting up/building your website, focus is laid in ensuring a good user interface avoiding any broken links. The second focus is of course the content that you are going to put on the website.

However, after your website would have gain traction and having a lot of data for the reader, it will start becoming critical to ensure that the performance of your website is also good. With so many websites on the same topic available on the web, it additionally also become important to have this value add for your own website in order to attract readers. An article on SearchEngineLand even indicates that the page speed might become one of the ranking factors in the Google search algorithm.

Keeping all of the above in mind, it become extremely important to be able to analyze your website performance and take corrective actions in order to improve the visitor experience. This where the tool called “Page Speed” will come to your rescue. This tool is essentially a firefox add-on which when installed will help to analyze your website and then provide suggestions as to how to improve and which files to specifically analyze. For each of the suggestions made by the tool, you can search for solutions in the help database and look for possible changes to be made in your webmaster configuration. Note that the tool uses the webmaster best practices as the guideline for the analysis. Hence if you take the corrective steps and make the suggested improvements you will definitely reap the following benefits

Have a faster website
Improved visitor experience
Less hosting bandwidth requirements
Possible improvement in page ranking depending on how Google goes about changing it’s ranking algorithm

Installation

You need to have the firefox browser installed on your PC. Download it here.
Firebug add-on for firefox. Download it here.
Install page speed here

Once you are done with the installation, just restart firefox and open your website in the browser. Open the Firebug menu as indicated below

On the firebug menu, go to the “Page Speed” tab and click on “Analyze Performance”

After you click on the Analyze button, you would see a generated report about the various observations and issues discovered with the web page. You would be required to go through each of the items and see what best can be done to take a corrective action. Note that you can click on each of the items and then search for solution on the page speed help page. The following snapshot shows the output when the test was run for the Google India home page.