Page Speed and Faster web

The official Google blog posted an entry the other day - Let's make the web faster on how far we have come and the importance of getting the web faster.

because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps

There are some tools already out there and Page Speed from Google is one of them.

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time.

All the best practices listed:
* Avoid CSS expressions
* Combine external CSS
* Combine external JavaScript
* Defer loading of JavaScript
* Enable gzip compression
* Leverage browser caching
* Leverage proxy caching
* Minify JavaScript
* Minimize cookie size
* Minimize DNS lookups
* Minimize redirects
* Optimize images
* Optimize the order of styles and scripts
* Parallelize downloads across hostnames
* Put CSS in the document head
* Remove unused CSS
* Serve resources from a consistent URL
* Serve static content from a cookieless domain
* Specify image dimensions
* Use efficient CSS selectors

After installing the firebug add-on and you have restarted Firefox you will see this when opening firebug.


When pressing the "Analyze Performance" button you will get a list of the results from measurements based on the best practices to act upon.



You can also record the activity on the Page Speed Activity button to see how long each activity takes to narrow the search down for perfomance pits.