Measure website performance using google webmaster tools

You might think about your website performance. Website performance indicates web page loading time for your site. In other words it is speed of your site, how fast is your web site. In fact the goal of any website is minimize the loading time for every page because lower loading time leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs.

In this post I will discuss how we can measure the speed of individual webpage of our website and page speed tool using google webmaster tools.

Step 01: The first thing you need is to setup google webmaster tools for your site and verify your site. In the post Setup Google Webmaster Tools it is discussed about how we can setup webmaster tools for a blog or for a site.

Step 02:
- Log in to your webmaster tools.
- List of verified site you have will appeared. If you have many sites click on the sites that you want to measure page speed.

Step 03: You will enter into the Dashboard. Click on Labs from left menu and select Site Performance. Left menu will look like below.

Step 04: In the right side, you will see various suggestions like average load time, page speed suggestion along with performance overview.
Following is an example for my blog.

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 6.4 seconds to load (updated on Dec 31, 2009). This is slower than 82% of sites. The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Example pages

These are some example pages from your site and the time that they take to load in a browser (in seconds).

URL	Load time
/	19.4

Page Speed suggestions

These are some example pages from your site and some suggestions on how to optimize them, based on the Page Speed tool.

URL

/2009/01/ora-12557-tnsprotocol-adapter-not.htmlDetails: Save up to 79.4 KB, 5 requests, 6 DNS lookups Enable gzip compression Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 79.4 KB: http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-app/scripts/4095335807-common.js (16.1 KB) http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/995923812-widgets.js (41.6 KB) http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/3796602922-widget_css_bundle.css (7.65 KB) http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.7 KB) http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/3727950723-blog_controls.css (425 bytes) Combine external JavaScript There are 2 JavaScript files served from www.blogger.com. They should be combined into as few files as possible: http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-app/scripts/4095335807-common.js http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/995923812-widgets.js Minimize DNS lookups The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZUvaE3CpMkI/SaphR7EJh3I/AAAAAAAAAVk/tvRutgicDl0/S45/C%3A%5CDocuments%20and%20Settings%5CAdministrator%5CMy%20Documents%5CMy%20Pictures%5Cpersonal%5CMyself.jpg&imgmax=640 http://c42.statcounter.com/t.php?sc_project=3579537&resolution=1024&h=1024&camefrom=&u=http%3A//arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/01/ora-12557-tnsprotocol-adapter-not.html&t=Oracle%20in%20World%3A%20ORA-12557%3A%20TNS%3Aprotocol%20adapter%20not%20loadable&java=1&security=7ddb1688&sc_random=0.278324234&sc_snum=1&invisible=1 http://img2.blogblog.com/img/b16-rounded.gif http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js Serve resources from a consistent URL The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 bytes and 1 requests: http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=8616954574848172664&zx=c45d0811-5453-4a50-9d33-e6a2fdce931b http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=8616954574848172664&zx=0aed3f77-2e10-4bb2-b007-4ab77989c2ee Combine external CSS There are 4 CSS files served from www.blogger.com. They should be combined into as few files as possible: http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=8616954574848172664&zx=c45d0811-5453-4a50-9d33-e6a2fdce931b http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/3796602922-widget_css_bundle.css http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/3727950723-blog_controls.css http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?targetBlogID=8616954574848172664&zx=0aed3f77-2e10-4bb2-b007-4ab77989c2ee

Step 05: The next step is to install page speed tool. You can install page speed tool from the window Page Speed Tool. To make page speed tool work you also need to install firebug. You can install firebug from the link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/1843. After you install page speed tool and firebug open the site/link in browser for which you want to measure page speed.

Step 06: Click on the firefox Tools Menu, select Firebug from the dropdown menu and then select "Open Firebug in New Window". Following image is a snapshot from my windows.

Step 07: You will see firebug is loaded in a new window. Select "Page Speed" from the tabs and click "Analyze Performance".

You will see Overall performance summary for your webpage. Following is the performance for my site that is suggested by page speed tool.
1) [Score: 48%] Minimize DNS lookups

2) [Score: 53.8%] Leverage browser caching

3) [Score: 76.9%] Leverage proxy caching

4) [Score: 70.2%] Minify CSS

5) [Score: 79%] Optimize the order of styles and scripts

6) [Score: 67%] Avoid CSS expressions

7) [Score: 75.9%] Remove unused CSS

8) [Score: 78.4%] Serve static content from a cookieless domain

9) [Score: 71%] Use efficient CSS selectors

10) [Score: 99.8%] Enable gzip compression

11) [Score: 89%] Combine external JavaScript

12) [Score: 87.7%] Minify JavaScript

13) [Score: 95.5%] Optimize images

14) [Score: 100%] Combine external CSS

15) [Score: 90%] Specify image dimensions

16) [Score: 100%] Minimize cookie size

17) [Score: 100%] Serve resources from a consistent URL

18) [Score: 100%] Minimize redirects

19) [Score: 100%] Put CSS in the document head

20) [disabled] Defer loading of JavaScript

21) [n/a] Parallelize downloads across hostnames

Based on the score and the details recommendation you will take further decision to speed up your site. The target is to make the score 100%.
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