Making sure your site is fast and why it matters

I've just read this post at CopyBlogger which makes a compelling case for making sure that your web pages load as quickly as possible.

Load speed is a signal used by Google. But just as importantly, very small delays in load speed loses visitors.

Reactivity is free when downloaded from the web and tests your page, breaking it down and showing all the files it finds with load times for each (using a single thread for a more accurate measurement of each).

You'll easily spot bottlenecks - often third-party code or plugins can cause such delays and be difficult to track down.

http://peacockmedia.co.uk/reactivity/

Reactivity is a standalone component of Scrutiny which is a suite of website analysis tools.

http://peacockmedia.co.uk/scrutiny/

Testing page weight where gzip is being used

Webmasters using Scrutiny and Reactivity can now see uncompressed and compressed size of files and  therefore easily see the benefit of their servers' gzip service

Following a support request, I've been looking at the way that these apps show file size and page weight where gzip compression is being used.

The idea is simple and effective - the server sends the file compressed and it's re-inflated at the client side. The transfer time is thus reduced.

Scrutiny and Reactivity were giving file size as the uncompressed size.

It was easy to enhance these apps to take this into consideration. They now show both the compressed and uncompressed size of files, and both totals.

The enhancement is now available in Scrutiny 3.1 and ReActivity 1.1