Website Performance monitoring: tools you should try
Performance is one of important sides of any project. In order to monitor website performance there are a lot of different tools and services however I just want to list few of them which are free and everyone may try them without spending a lot of money.
GTmetrix
First of all I want to mention GTmetrix (http://gtmetrix.com/). That services allows you to check performance and highlights found issues right away without any registration. You can just enter your website URL.
Here is an example of result based on scanning this website (oh, yes, that’s far from perfect):
I will try few plugins later to optimize the performance and will post the results into separate article.
SiteSpeed.io
Another great tool I want to mention is SiteSpeed.io (http://www.sitespeed.io/). This solution can be installed on your own server and also generates a lot of information of the specified web pages based on the pre-defined rules.
You should note that most of the result are just percents and time values. If you want to produce graphics based on them and monitor the improvements during website development you should take a look at Graphite project (http://graphite.wikidot.com/).
YSlow
We cannot overestimate importance of YSlow. Both of the tools mentioned above are using YSlow to generate most of their results. All of these «best practices» for website performance are defined at Yahoo! Developer Network at https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
WebPageTest
WebPageTest similar to GTmetrix does not require registration and provides results right away. Main feature of this service if to test web page loading from different geographical locations. There are nodes in different continents and you can use this for free to get an understanding of how your website is being loaded from different part of the world.