Is my WordPress blog fast enough? (part 2)
Before we can start with performance tuning we need to find out and prioritize all points in our website load speed and make sure we are implementing all stuff in right order (from more important actions to less important ones). So let’s see how can be client side performance measured.
Browser Plugins
Almost every browser (maybe except Opera) has its own tools to measure client side load speed / create waterfall. Let’s start with IE (IE8 has also internal tool – HTTP(S) tab in Debug Panel, but IE6/7 don’t have this). It has external plugin – HTTP Watch (Basic edition is free, and it’s enough for our analyze). With our blog it will give the following picture
It can be complicated at the first view, but let’s review ir step by step (it’s important because all the other client side performance tools have the same output format). Well the top part (man part) is load waterfall (diagram). It shows the process of requesting / downloading files from the website to the browser. As you can see browser requests most of files one-by-one (or with a few parallel connections). It’s one of the 2 main troubles with slow client side – connections limit.
Also you can see that the top part of this waterfall ‘blocks’ (especially the third bar, a JavaScript file) other resources from being downloaded. It’s well known scripts’ blocking behavior. Right now we are just looking over this situation without any deep details. This post is about general possibilities which can give us client side performance analytical tools.
At the bottom line please take a look to the lower part of the diagram – there is a summary. Overall page load time is about 5.5 seconds (and only 0.9 of them was taken by HTML document, and only 1/3 of this document-related time was consumed by server side). So only a small part of overall website load process (actually about 5%).
But let’s perform a quick review for other amazing browser tools. It’s also Firebug Net Panel (Firefox):
As you can see bad picture remains the same – total load time about 5 seconds, only 0.2…0.8 seconds are taken with server side. And the last one – Web Inspector in Developer Tools – is in Safari / Chrome
All tools show more or less the same picture. So we can use anyone to detect the weakest points and fix them. Of course if you are going to implement for your blog maximum performance you should use all of them.
Online tools
There is also a large variety of online tools to perform almost the same analysis. But you should know that all online tools create analytical picture of website load process – they emulate browsers, but not the browsers themselves. Of course this can better if we can eliminate network delays influence and somehow ‘fix’ the picture. But drawbacks often lead to less precise data and inability to measure current impact from JavaScript. But let’s review.
The most famous – tools.pingdom.com – gives us the following:
Also there is site-perf.com
So you can see that model load waterfall doesn’t fit browsers’ one much (and ’synthetic’ load time differs significantly). Moreover it doesn’t give any information about scripts’ blocking behavior. The last tool which should be mentioned – webo.name – handles this situation better:
So load time is closer to real values (4 seconds vs. 5…5.5 seconds) and blocking scripts are here. But anyway the most precise tool is a set of all tools to get overall data and check every possible ‘bottle neck’.
Conclusion
In this post we have reviewed a number of tools to measure client side performance of your WordPress website. As you can see client side takes about 5 seconds for an average website to load in browsers (it’s not all the truth but we reveal this in the nearest future).
So in our next step will define a number of actions to improve our blog speed according to collected data. How to compare available methods, evaluate possible gain, select and prioritize actions – all this will be in the next post. Keep tuned.
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