Cool Technology of the Week

This week, I was asked to evaluate a longstanding slow website problem.

One of the most challenging questions that CIOs receive is the "application is slow, can you fix it?" problem.

Root causes range from underpowered laptops, virus infected desktops, slow wireless connections, firewall congestion, web server memory leaks, storage I/O bottlenecks, database indexing, and poorly written HTML.

For this particular issue, I suspected application issues in the use of Javascript, style sheets, graphics, and flash objects, not infrastructure.

A quick search on Google yielded this great website optimization tool , which is a companion to an O'Reilly book Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew B. King.

It diagnosed the problem immediately as an inefficient web page design.   We implemented compression of stylesheets, Javascript, and images, which increased performance ten-fold.  The entire site is being rewritten and we'll be sure to use this tool before go live to verify that we've followed best practices.

A great tool and an O'Reilly Book for optimizing website performance - that's cool!