Question

Some pages on my site take a while to load. I was wondering if there were any free tools that could help me speed up/improve the code. I’ve googled a bit but I wanna her from the experts.

EDIT: I’m using PHP, MySQL, jQuery, etc.

Answer 1

The first step is to understand there are two aspects of site performance – back-end (server & database related) and front-end (browser/caching related). Optimizing a dynamic website for database speed, server speed and so-on is almost a entire discipline itself.

Optimizing for the front-end, where the browser requests the page and it’s elements from the server is where 80% of most “speed” issues with websites lie, so that’s what I’ll focus on.

The first step is to identify where your speed issues occur. There’s several online tools that can help with that part:

• gtMetrix – runs Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s PageSpeed tools on your page together, and outputs both sets of findings and the “waterfall”. Also links to both sets of resources to assist in rectifying issues.
• Zoompf – runs a comprehensive optimization checklist against your site with some (limited) information on how to rectify.
• Webpage Analyzer – checks the number and size of the elements requested by a browser to create the page – good for identifying bottlenecks.
• WebPageTest – a solid alternative to most of the above tools – provides 1st load/2nd load checking and screenshots of your page loading from different locations.

The biggest gains can normally made around combining/minification/compression of your content, and one of the better tools that enable you to do that is the Minify project (requires PHP).

That should give you enough to start with until you come back with specifics.