Recently I followed a link from a Barry North/Compass Designs newsletter on "Getting Ranked in SEO Using Google's Page Speed Tool" (www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/getti...gles-page-speed-tool).

Admittedly, they were using it to promote their Joomla website hosting, however, I was intrigued by Page Speed, so I followed the link through to Google Labs (pagespeed.googlelabs.com/) and analysed the performance of a couple of websites I manage and got lots of suggestions on how they could be improved, with a High Priority suggestion being to Leverage browser caching.

This led me to Googling Joomla forums on how this could be achieved and turning up other tools for analysing performance, like Web Page Analyzer (www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/), Joomla Performance Grader (www.joomlaperformance.com/component/opti...rformance/Itemid,52/) and YSlow for Firefox.

It was all rather depressing, as my websites scored very low on the performance scale and some of the suggestions, such as to Combine images into CSS sprites, are just not possible with my templates.

Anyway, I felt a little better when one of my favourtie websites, the ABC (www.abc.net.au), also scored low on performance and YSlow gave Google a "D" for www.google.com.au

But it has got me wondering how much performance testing I should be doing on the websites (which are not mission critical, nor intensively used) beyond my usual, "Yes, it seems to be loading and laid out okay."

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, either in forum or over a beer at a user group meeting.

Regards,
Robert

Hey Robert,

I usually do all the easy stuff that I can in all the site builds. That way it is a little lighter in load overall without trying too hard.

Other steps to get a website to a grade B takes a lot of work. The more components and plugins that you use the more work you need to do in combining CSS files, image assets and JS files to get things really optimised.

So I find that the standard things that you can change on a server and a few things that you can do in a site build is the perfect starting point but that usually will just give you a high D or low C.

But if the overall site load time is low, then I think it is passable until you have more time to dedicate to a more intensive site optimisation process.

Peter

Thanks, Peter, I like the "easy stuff" suggestion, as that's why I got into Joomla in the 1st place! Now I'm getting bogged down in PHP and CSS and templating and security and performance etc, etc, etc ... when all I want to do is put up some interesting content I'm beginning to wonder if it's a case of subconscious study avoidance!?

Nicholas was working on something cool to make the whole site optimisation process easier for everyone. I don't know how far he has gotten yet though.

Might be worth picking on him next user group meeting to see if he is ready yet.