Web developers and applications developers must have faced this problem related to performance of their Websites.

In this post I will focus of how to track website performance. Remember the websites behave different under different browsers so if your site loads faster in FireFox , it may not load with same speed in IE.

Firefox has some very good plugins to track the performance of your website. The two plugins which I really like are

1. Yslow : ySlow analyzes web pages and suggest how to improve performance based on yahoo’s rule for high performance website. You may not agree with some of the recommendations but nevertheless , it gives very good feedback.

2. FireBug : Firebug is not only an excellent  tool for editing and debugging java script, html , css  but also helps you analyze the performance of pages.

Let us analyze Skill-Guru with Yslow and see how it performs . After installing Yslow in your firefox , you will need to restart the browser.

Open the site , in our case www.skill-guru.com . On right side you will see a icon on right side of firefox bottom bar. Click on that.  You will be shown a screen as below.

Click on Run Test

Once test is run ,  you can see the results under different tabs. Some o them would be like

As you can see , we are not gzipping files and this will be pointed out by Yslow.

Yslow grades  your site based on number of parameters.

Overall Skill-guru performs reasonably well in performance although we could incorporate some suggestions of Yslow.

This YSlow user guide suggesting the best practices for designing web pages.

Once the performance of Skill-Guru is improved based on YSlow recommendations, we will post the results.