Business Online Optimisation: Nifty little Google presentation

Here's a resource I found recently that is a back to basics approach on designing a website to attract visitors online. Page 29 says it all very succinctly.

Speeding up your website - Yslow and Page Speed

There are a number of tools you can use to improve the speed of your website. Why are they important? Well as a user you would appreciate that a slow loading page is always a turn off. If you have to wait too long you may go elsewhere.

Yslow (Yahoo) and Page Speed (Google) both have Firefox plug-ins you can use to have a quick appraisal of key pages on your website so you can make them run faster.

Here's one such report from Yslow:

C, well not bad but not best practice either.

Here are the recommendations made by the tool where we didn't score an A:

• Use a content delivery network to speed up delivery of content to people in other places: our server is located in Melbourne primarily for a Melbourne audience so I'm happy to ignore that one.
• Add expires headers: You can select information to expire in a certain duration which means that a subsequent visitor won't reload that content unless it has expired. This seems a sensible suggestion.
• Compress components with gzip: It is suggesting I actually compress key files so that less data needs to be transferred so pages can be loaded more quickly. It also increases the burden on the recipient browser. I'm not about to rush out and do this but I might investigate it.
• Configure Etags: This is about identifying to a recipient that part of a page hasn't changed since they last browsed by giving it a unique ID. I think this sounds like an overkill for a site like ours.

There is also a whole lot of statistics it generates as well as tools you can use to reduce the size of your files - removing whitespaces like carriage returns and spaces, and using lossy compression on images.

Google's Page Speed is another tool which at first glance seems to perform the same function:

There are many other best practice hints and tips these tools generate. You should carefully consider which you wish to implement and in what priority order. Some will definitely increase page speed and others may take you unnecessary time and heartache.

Summary

There are definitely benefits of providing a faster site for your users and the web in general. Consider for example the cumulative effect of these improvements if everyone implemented bandwidth and speed saving techniques on their websites: we'd have a faster web, people would be able to download more before hitting their limits and people on slow connections will have a better experience. Well worth striving for I say!

Google Analytics on an iPhone or PDA

I've recently been fiddling around with using Google Analytics on an iPhone.

For those that are unfamiliar with the iPhone (and similar PDAs that are entering the market) they allow a near full screen browsing experience on a portable touch screen device.

The big benefit is you can access your analytics wherever you are provided you are prepared to pay for the data involved in downloading the page.

What are the options?

1. You can browse to Analytics using the Safari browser at analytics.google.com which shows you your familiar viewing experience.

Benefits: - all data available; if you also install the Google Mobile app on your iPhone you will be automatically logged into your account when you browse to the URL.

Disadvantages: charts do not display properly on the iPhone

2. You can use a specific iPhone application that uses the touch screen functionality to its fullest potential eg browse to http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/googleanalyticsforiphone.html and access for free or pay for this app through itunes - http://analyticsapp.com/.

Benefits: displays information graphically

Disadvantages: limited data available

Final thoughts

Apart from showing others your analytics, or doing a quick check when you have a spare moment, I don't think this replaces the full screen browser equivalent you'll want to use when doing a deep dive on your data.