The speed of your website loading is still a common issue with websites. Looking back in the past 56k modems were the majority of people online. Now days its common for average speeds above 2-10MB per second! It would seem that with the increase of the speeds that size would truly matter. However, because faster download speeds are more common larger sites are even more possible.
Even with the larger speed boost from 56k to several MB per second. Its still a good idea to optimize your website. Monitoring a page load can be rather difficult, but thankfully there are several tools in the trade. Just to name a few...
Loads.in is a neat method to tracking how a page loads. It takes a picture of the loading process 5 times over. From 0 seconds to the end of loading.
Along with this it has a couple extra additions a "Waterfall Chart." This gives detailed information as to 301's, 404's, header details between files, and just overall properties of the page loading. I found it extremely handy when trying to track different parts of the site redirecting when they shouldn't have.
Pagespeed has similar methods only it is plugin based and works with Firefox, Chrome, and now also has stuff to connect directly into Apache. I found it to be similar details to loads.in, but doesn't require a download. On the downside loads.in has been down several times in the past and only until recently was I able to use it.
Google Chrome V13 and probably earilier versions has tons of features now similar to Firefox plugin Firebug. That allows for entire site audits giving extreme details down to what can be reduce/cleaned/and speed up your site. Now days you can basically chose your favorite browser and with that comes similar plugins to audit for page speed.
While with the coming days faster internet speeds are ramping up so are download sizes increasing. Because of this it is still important for your site to load fast. People are not how they used to be and wanting to sit through long downloads. As back in the 90's it was a common experience. Now its expected for an entire site to load quickly and hopefully WAY less than 5 seconds. Otherwise you might find some annoyed viewers looking to go to another site other than yours for information.
Why optimize?
1) Its rumored to help with certain SEO positions.
2) It will help initial load of a website and for those who are running slower internet speeds. "Yes a small percentage still use 56k!!"
3) Understanding current page processes is also important as a page locking up is not good either!
What can I do?
1) JS and CSS should be minified.
2) HTML should make sure you are using all of the CSS classes you have made.
3) Check and make sure you are not linking to any pages that are 404ing on your own site.
4) Make sure your mod rewrite is not looping to much as this will slow down partly.
5) GZip where it counts! Don't do this to all your JPG files though as this can be counter productive *more on this later.
6) Optimize image sizes. Make sure you save those images for web!
7) CDN if you can afford it. Larger sites might find this a necessity as placing an 150KB image could literally bring down an entire website if the site gets a significant amount of traffic.
8) Understand the number of users hitting your site and make sure you have the proper hardware. Ex: Do I need more RAM or is it time to through a load balancer and an additional server?
9) Caching - Are you caching those database calls or are you pulling every single time a page is queued up? This could potentially on larger sites be a show stopper.
10) Finally making sure your HTML validates is always a good idea. This will not only help reduce the number of errors with cross browsers but it will reduce most browers such as Firefox from having to "fix" the issue.
If you follow the above you can easily have a fast quick website. There are probably about a billion other ways and things to optimize your site, but the ten items above will be a really great start.
