Ultimate Guide to Page Speed: Tools

Preface: Let’s make a ruckus
Chapter 1: A Guide To This Guide
Chapter 2: Why Page Speed Matters To Digital Marketing
Chapter 3: What Impacts Page Speed?
Chapter 4: Novice – Image Compression And Such
Chapter 5: Intermediate – Server Compression And Geekery
Chapter 6: Advanced – Varnish, Apache and nginx
Chapter 7: Tools ← You are here
Chapter 8: Glossary
Hidden Track: WordPress Optimization

In this post: An utterly random, disorganized list of tools.

We’ll add to this now and then:

• Pingdom. Quick page speed test. Super simple. Great for impressing (or depressing) clients.
• WebPageTest. Another page speed tester, with a lot more features. Does ‘film strips’ showing page render, and lets you ‘race’ with other sites.
• Google Page Speed Insights. Google’s own page speed test. They provide recommendations, compressed images, minified code and free chocolate. Not the last one. But the rest.
• YSlow. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Yahoo!’s dev team built a plugin called YSlow. It’s one of the deepest looks you can get at a site’s performance. It’s also really picky. We’ve never seen a site get an ‘A+.’
• Imageoptim on the Mac. Far and away the best easy-to-use image compressor you’ll find. It’s what we used for the examples above.
• Caesium on the PC. Not quite as easy, but still awfully good.
• Google Chrome HTTP Archive Viewer. A Chrome app that lets you view HAR files.

Hidden Track: WordPress Optimization