Speed Test

[MarkD]

After reading Alvins post about speed & seo I'm thinking about delivering compressed pages for my main web site.

I have a site I use for experiments (so it's not much to look at) that is pretty slow, so slow I can't even access it at times! (Must get round to changing hosts!).

It's a drupal site & over the weekend I've implemented compression....

If anyone has the time can they visit the site and click a few pages and give me some feedback on how fast (or slow) it is... I've tested with IE, FF, Safari & Opera so if anyone has access to any other browsers that would be useful too!

The site is http://www.bridgingfinanceoptions.com

Many thanks (in advance)

[consultant]

fast on FF3!

[RandomTemplate]

Im based in Scotland, UK - BT Business Broadband 8mb.

Instant loading in Firefox for new pages, less than a second on the initial load. Same with Internet explorer.

I did have 1 small thing though, the header reflection seems a little out of place given the sites style, maybe just toning it down a little (i know this has nothing to do with the speed but was a side-thought).

[MarkD]

Im based in Scotland, UK - BT Business Broadband 8mb.

Instant loading in Firefox for new pages, less than a second on the initial load. Same with Internet explorer.

I did have 1 small thing though, the header reflection seems a little out of place given the sites style, maybe just toning it down a little (i know this has nothing to do with the speed but was a side-thought).

Thanks for the feedback.

As for the header I put that up this weekend, previously without the reflection... As I said in the original post, it's really just a site I use for experimentation so not really looking for a review, but I note your comment.

If theres no negative feedback, then I'll wait for the search engines to reindex and if everything looks ok I'll implement on my main web site

p.s. if anyone has a slower BB connection i.e. 1-2mb that would be useful to know

[xela1966]

I notice that google add on the webmasters tools a page presenting the site speed. They provide a addone to the firefox to test the speed sites.
Any way I test my site on the links below they look a good tools.

http://tools.pingdom.com/
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

[corporatefin]

Mark, your site is extremely fast!

The biggest problem with the speed on my site is the load time of my google ads.

[UKSMF]

Again Fast

Hope that helps

Dave

[MarkD]

Thanks to those who have contributed....

As the faster speed quickly fed into my google webmaster stats and I spotted no problems I've now implemented on my main site (also using drupal)...

I too would like to recommend pingdoms page speed tool and also the tester at "www dot webpagetest dot org" which is much more comprehensive....

For those that are interested I'll quickly summarise what I've done and why...

1. html/css/javascript are now served as compressed gzip
2. reduced http requests by 30%+ by :-
   • merging all css into one file
   • merging and compressing some images
   • using css image sprites
   • relocating images to a subdomain (main site only)
   • one module (addthis) was calling j-query so removed and just called direct in my page template so apart from addthis my pages are javascript free
   • moved the call to that one remaining javascript to the bottom of the page

The result on my main page is that the typical page rendering time of 3.5 seconds has dropped to typically 1.5 seconds! (internal pages are even quicker) Which I think is not bad for a CMS on shared hosting...

Finally the reason I have done all this is that google has obviously stated it's intent on page speed. I've also taken the view that as they announced they'd actually changed the workings of rel="nofollow" 12 months before telling us... I'd take this action now just in case speed is already a ranking factor!

Just got to try and minimise changes now to see if it has any effect on serps!

p.s. if anyone would like to try out the speed on my main business finance site it's the Commercial Finance Brokers link in my sig...

[promatt]

Really fast for me

[adriennep]

Every page loaded instantly - which is quite unusual as I'm also inflicted with bt broadband!