I am sure that you have encountered a site before where you have thought, “man this site is slow” and perhaps you even left before the site fully loaded. I sure know that I have! As a web designer/developer, you want to make sure that you can provide your client(s) with a site that is efficient in all capacities including load time, especially because load time directly affects a number of other areas of web performance (SEO, Analytics, UX and even Cost).
There are a number of tools out there to help you troubleshoot and optimize you websites. In the past I have used a firefox plugin called YSlow, a FireBug extension that is awesome and quite helpful. There is nothing wrong with YSlow, but this week google came out with a new development tool called Page Speed.
No plug-in required! You can navigate to the Page Speed site at any time to utilize this development tool. All you need to do it insert the URL, optionally choose desktop or mobile and click “analyze performance”. The site then breaks down the areas of potential improvement in terms of High, Medium and Low priority. Based off of all of the check list of best practices, Google then gives your site a referential score (out of 100).
The really unique feature here is for sure the “mobile” option. This option feeds in a totally different set of “best practices” off of which it ranks your site. All in all this is a really cool tool that is definitely worth checking out.
Tags: Web Development, What's Hot, Whats New
Splist for jQuery: I am very excited to announce my jQuery plug-in -