From time to time I have a feeling that I live in a paralell universe. And I wake up one day, and have tools that wasn’t there a few days before, but this happens only for me, because most likely everybody else were using these tools for a while now. Anyway this is what happened with “Pagespeed” too.Ā I found it and realized there is a lot to do with this tool. The online version is just a “demo” in my point of view, the “real” tool begins when you download the plugin (I used the firefox version) install it and start running some tests.
What is really wonderfulĀ is that you can save the optimized images, the minified css, also a lot of suggestion what you should do, where you should start the optimization for your page to load as fast as possible. It will also give a score for your website’s load time. It can be very addictive to try to get as higher score as possible :D
It is very similar with Yahoo’s Yslow. In fact both of these tools, Yslow and Google Page Speed require Firebug to run, they are “new tabs” between Firebug’s other tags. It took a while for me to realize the obvious: I need to clear my browser cache each time I want to see the real numbers. Without that, it kept loading the cached version of my javascripts, css and images, and was showing the very same errors over and over again.Ā I just set up my firefox to clear all the cache when I close it and every time I needed to have my data downloaded again, I just closed my firefox.
If you need a “developer” version of firefox, because for example you don’t want to clear the cache every time you close firefox, you can use “Firefox Portable” for this.
Another great tool is WebPageTest.Ā What I like it at WebpageTest is the website loading visual comparator tool, that can show you the difference between 3 sites. It will create a cute video to :D
