Monthly Archives: April 2011

The recent news that Yahoo! has sold Del.icio.us to the guys who founded YouTube got me thinking about another former big name in link sharing, Technorati. Does anyone still use either of these sites? I did back in 2006, but mostly just half-heartedly to promote ardamis.com. It would seem that in 2011, we’ve found other, more directly social means for sharing sites.

http://www.delicious.com/ardamis
http://www.delicious.com/search?p=ardamis
http://technorati.com/blogs/www.ardamis.com

A quick glance around Technorati today for sites ranked similarly with ardamis.com turned up little other than spam sites, just like everything else.

I’ve written a few tutorials lately on how to reduce page load times. While I use Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plugin for evaluating pages for load times, there are times when I want a second opinion, or want to point a client to a tool. This post is a collection of links to online tools for testing web page performance.

Page Speed Online

http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

Google’s wonderful Page Speed tool, once only available as a Firefox browser Add-on, finally arrives as an online tool. Achieving a high score (ardamis.com is a 96/100) should be on every web developer’s list of things to do before the culmination of a project.

Enter a URL and Page Speed Online will run performance tests based on a set of best practices known to reduce page load times.

  • Optimizing caching – keeping your application’s data and logic off the network altogether
  • Minimizing round-trip times – reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
  • Minimizing request overhead – reducing upload size
  • Minimizing payload size – reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages
  • Optimizing browser rendering – improving the browser’s layout of a page

WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/

WebPagetest is an excellent application for users who want the same sort of detailed reporting that one gets with Page Speed.

  • Load time speed test on first view (cold cache) and repeat view (hot cache), first byte and start render
  • Optimization checklist
  • Enable keep-alive, HTML compression, image compression, cache static content, combine JavaScript and CSS, and use of CDN
  • Waterfall
  • Response headers for each request

Load Impact

http://loadimpact.com/pageanalyzer.php

Load Impact is an online load testing service that lets you load- and stress test your website over the Internet. The page analyzer analyzes your web page performance by emulating how a web browser would load your page and all resources referenced in it. The page and its referenced resources are loaded and important performance metrics are measured and displayed in a load-bar diagram along with other per-resource attributes such as URL, size, compression ratio and HTTP status code.

ByteCheck

http://www.bytecheck.com/

ByteCheck is a super minimal site that return your page’s all-important time to first byte (TTFB). Time to first byte is the time it takes for a browser to start receiving information after it has started to make the request to the server, and is responsible for a visitor’s first impression that a page is fast- or slow-loading.

Web Page Analyzer

http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

My opinion is that the Web Page Analyzer report is good for beginners without much technical knowledge of things like gzip compression and Expires headers. It’s a bit dated, and is primarily concerned with basics like how many images a page contains. It tells you how fast you can expect your page to load for dial-up visitors, which strikes me as quaint and not particularly useful.

  • Total HTTP requests
  • Total size
  • Total size per object type (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.)
  • Analysis of number of files and file size as compared to recommended limits

The Performance Grader

http://www.joomlaperformance.com/component/option,com_performance/Itemid,52/

This is another simplistic analysis of a site, like Web Page Analyzer, that returns its analysis in the form of pass/fail grades on about 14 different tests. I expect that it would be useful for developers who want to show a client a third-party’s analysis of their work, if the third-party is not terribly technically savvy.

One unique thing about this tool, though, is that it totals up the size of all images referenced in CSS files (even those that the current page isn’t using).

  • HTML Size
  • Total Size
  • Total Requests
  • Generation Time
  • Number of Hosts
  • Number of Images
  • Size of Images
  • Number of CSS Files
  • Size of CSS Files
  • Number of Script Files
  • Size of Script Files
  • HTML Encoding
  • Valid HTML
  • Frames

Attempting to run the W3C Link Checker against //ardamis.com/ returns an error message.

Error: 406 Not Acceptable

This is what the W3C says about the 406 HTTP status header:

406 Not Acceptable
The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the request.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

In other words, the W3C Link Checker requests the web page, and tells the web server that, by the way, it can only accept a responses in a certain format. The web server then regrets to inform the requestor that it cannot fulfill this request, because it cannot return a response that would be acceptable to the requestor. It does this in the form of a 406 Not Acceptable HTTP header. The W3C Link Checker then outputs this error.

Other W3C apps, like Unicorn – W3C’s Unified Validator and the W3C HTML Validator don’t seem to be sending the same HTTP headers. (But I did note that there were a few small issues preventing the home page from passing the test, which I then fixed.)

Ardamis runs on WordPress, with a custom theme originally developed years ago from the Kubrick theme and a handful of plugins (as more completely described at the colophon page). I tinker with the site, from time to time, trying to speed it up or what-have-you. But no amount of tinkering seemed to resolve this problem. Over the course of a few months, I’d try various changes to the site to see if there was something I could do to fix this problem. I had pretty much convinced myself that it was going to be an issue for my web host when, miraculously, after making some changes to the .htaccess file, my theme and disabling one of the plugins (which I can’t see how would possibly affect the HTTP headers) the Link Checker began working.

In the results page for www.ardamis.com, it lists some of the headers used:

Settings used:

  • Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml;q=0.9, application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml;q=0.6, */*;q=0.5
  • Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
  • Referer: sending
  • Sleeping 1 second between requests to each server

I’m not sure what I did to make this work, or even if it was something I did. But further troubleshooting would have involved disabling all plugins, trying a different theme, and then ruling out WordPress entirely.

As of April, 2011, the home page of ardamis.com has over two million inbound links, with over 2,800,000 total inbound links to all pages on the site.

This is an increase of 1,200,000 inbound links to the home page alone since July, 2010. I calculate that the home page is gained an average of 150,000 inbound links a month during the last eight months. That’s pretty amazing.

April 2011 Inbound Links

But I continue to be disappointed in the Site Performance area of Webmaster Tools. Try as I might, Google still thinks my site is crushingly slow, with average load times of 2.9 seconds, even though my independent tests suggest that the site consistently returns pages in less than two seconds.

April 2011 Site Performance

I’ll keep at it.