Google Page Speed

I was listening to a HanselMinutes podcast who was interviewing the guys from StackOverflow. Apparently the guys at StackOverflow use an OpenSource tool from Google called Page Speed to better their web site. So naturally I decided to download and try it myself.

Wow. And double wow. This is an excellent tool. It works as an extension to Firebug in Firefox. Once you open Firebug on a web page there are 2 new tabs for Page Speed. You can analyze the performance of your web site. This will give you an overall performance summary of the web page and allow you to drill down into various facets.


Not only does this show you the problem areas of the web page but they also give you the solutions to solve them. With images they give you compressed image versions you can use. With Javascript they give you compressed versions to use. With other things they direct you to best practices pages that give you insight into how to improve the page.

The Show Resources link shows you a complete break down of which elements are being downloaded to the browser and their corresponding sizes with how long it took to download them. The Page Speed Activity tab lets you record activities on your page and it will give you a graph on which elements were executed at which time intervals.

This is a very nice tool that we will be incorporating in our development efforts and to ensure that best practices are being followed.