Beginners guide to Web Hosting

Speed analysis tools and resources

Nearly everything that we know about web page loading speed that we have discussed in this tutorial comes from two books and one tool written by Steve Souders who was commissioned by Yahoo! to speed up their websites. If you are interested in further reading on the subject (and there are many more tips that we have not mentioned), we highly recommend these books. Our company has actually doubled its websites’ revenues by implementing these techniques because visitors to our websites stay on them for longer and come back to them more frequently. Click the images on the right to find the books on Amazon.

YSLow – In addition to the books he has created a plugin for Firefox called YSlow with which you can automatically analyse any web page against the techniques written in his books. This is a free download and can be found at http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Sprite tool – Although we have searched around, we cannot find a tool written to produce sprites and there really should be one. We have put it on our “to do” list but to be honest the list is so long we are hoping that we find someone else has created one before we have to. If you do come across one please let us know.

Speed optimisation service – If you are taken with the concepts of speed optimisation but do not have the technical ability or inclination to implement such changes we offer a speed optimisation service. Please contact us with your website details and we will quote you on optimising your site using these principles and others. In addition, we offer a redundant load-balanced hosting solution for anyone interested in delivering their site more efficiently and reliably from the server point of view. Our website hosting packages also enable you to implement every one of the techniques mentioned in this tutorial.

Index of all our tutorials: Wight Hat tutorials