List of Free Site Performance Tools

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate and improve the speed of your site:

Firefox / Firebug Add-ons: 

• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• Page Speed, a free tool from Google that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• Hammerhead - a free tool to measure the load time of web pages.

 Online Testing: 

• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• Port80 Software, free site performance testing tools on our website.

Development Tools:

• CSS Sprite Generator - Generates a CSS sprite out of a number of images.
• Smush It - Online tool that allows you to upload images for lossless compression and optimization. Provides a report of bytes saved and downloads a zip file containing the optimized versions of the files.

 Additional Script:

• In Google Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

 Looking for more free tools? Check out Google’s list.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Consider your image sizes for better site performance

Graphics and multimedia can take up more than 60% of the total file size of an average web page, so graphics optimization matters. Not only should the size and file type of your images be taken into consideration, but how fresh they are as well.

Image Caching

Minimizing round trips over the Web to revalidate cached items can make a huge difference in browser page load times. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this occurs when a user returns to a site for the second time, after an initial browser session. In this case, all page objects will have to be revalidated, each costing valuable fractions of a second and blocking actual new content from using the browser’s available network connections (not to mention consuming bandwidth and server cycles). Read the rest of this entry »

Google Steps up the Pace

Google Adds Speed Algorithm, Effects Site Rankings in Search

For a long time now Google has pushed the importance of speed in their products and on the web. Just last month Google has announced that they will be including a new trigger in their search ranking algorithms: site speed.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.” Read the rest of this entry »

32-bit .NET on 64-bit IIS? There’s an App Pool for That!

A lot of Port80 customers are still in the process of making a couple of related platform transitions — from 32-bit to 64-bit server hardware, and from IIS 6 (Server 2003) to IIS 7 (Server 2008). For those who are doing so, and facing the problem of what to do about your legacy .NET applications that use 32-bit DLLs, you’ll be glad to discover that Server 2008 is your friend.

With Server 2003, on 64-bit hardware, you had to choose whether to run all your IIS worker processes in 32-bit or 64-bit mode:  It was all or nothing.  But what you’ll find when you make your Server 2008 migration is that you now have the flexibility to run some Application Pools in native 64-bit mode, and others in 32-bit mode.

That’s extremely handy for managing the transition for legacy .NET apps that may rely on 32-bit DLLs. Since it lets you move sites and apps into the new 64-bit environment little by little. And best of all it’s trivial to set up in the IIS 7 Manager (no more futzing with the metabase). Rakki Muthukumar has a post from way back in 07 that lays it all out for you (yes, this technology has been available right from the get go with Server 2008).
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And, in case you’re wondering, we’re aware of the need to support this “mix-mode” scenario (part 32-bit, part-64) in our Port80 products as well.  httpZip already has support for mix-mode in Server 2008 and the same level of support is coming soon to CacheRight and LinkDeny as well.

/P80

Turbo Charging Your Web Server

A good place to turn in order to speed up your site is the server software and hardware itself.

Starting with software, it is fairly unlikely that Web administrators are going to quickly dump IIS for Apache or Apache for IIS, even when security, ease of use, or performance is cited as a reason to leave one camp for another. Put simply, the Web server and its associated operating system are often so intertwined with the Web site(s) that migration becomes an onerous and even risky task. Read the rest of this entry »