Speed up your website with Page Speed.
You are here > Home > Blog >
Using Google's "Page Speed"
This week I have been doing some speed enhancements to try
and speed up some websites for my clients. Google have a tool
called Page Speed that looks at your webpage and gives it a score
out of 100.
The link is here: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/#url=www&mobile=false
You can also get a plugin for Mozilla that runs the tool
locally. First download firebug for Firefox and then Page
Speed.
This is where the fun begins. You enter your URL to your
website and you get a report showing what steps you need to make to
your site to improve your score, and speed up the website. Remember
Google likes fast websites and your organic ranking could
improve.
However I had a few problems with it:
The score that the Mozilla Firefox plugin came to was
79/100 for the .co.uk domain and 81/100 for the.com. The page speed
website gave me 88/100 for the .co.uk domain and 87/100 for the
.com pointing to the same website.
Not sure what's going on there.
Anyway I have found that many of the results require the
combination of javascript and CSS into single files. Also the
compression of CSS files (called minifying) that removes space
(white space) such as tabs and indents and carriage returns with
the file.
This did improve the score, however what you are left with
if pretty much an un-editable mess. Mods are difficult to find and
execute. I needed a different strategy to handle CSS files in
progress.
I have created a subdirectory within the CSS dir on the
website called SOURCE. This holds all the un minified CSS files. In
many regards its worth breaking up the CSS into chunks to aid
location of the styling. Only when the site goes into production do
I minify and concatenate into a single file.
There are many online services that can take a CSS files
and minify it.
This is quite a good one. http://www.minifycss.com/css-compressor/
Of Page Speed's suggestions to improve the score,
many where CSS load and execution based. I suggest you focus on
improving this before attempting any of the other suggestions such
as "Parallelize downloads across hostnames". Hmmm, nice one
Google.
Another good one was to set a long expiry timeout at the
website hosting. I use IIS for my hosting and I found the setting
under HTTP Response Headers - Set Common Headers. I set the
content to expire after 7 days.
I guess I'll keep plugging away and report back any ground
breaking stuff I uncover.
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 04, 2011