Keep your site quick and lean for Black Friday

My new favourite web app/tool is webpagetest.org introduced to me by Alex Dyachov at X-Cart eCommerce software. In his excellent webcast on X-Cart Security and Performance Optimization he explains how you can use webpagetest to improve site speed and performance.

Up until now I have used the developer tools in chrome and firefox to give me this. This has been pretty good in identifying site elements that need browser caching, gzip and css merging. But you were always restricted to your pc’s performance and broadband connection. Also it was more difficult do this sort of optmisation on mobiles.

Webpagetest.org gives you all of this plus choosing the server location, online reports and keeping a history of your reports which you can then send to clients to show the before and after results.

Today I managed to get AAAA rating on a site which is not X-Cart but still php/mysql. Infact I managed to attain AAAA for the mobile version too so pretty impressed with the results. Even though Christmas is always busy for me, I have still managed to run through a number of clients sites to produce a list of todo’s which will help them and our servers during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.