Speeding up your web site

The most important part for a webdeveloper is to check the website for performance. How to optimize the page (code, database, image, external objects etc..). In the busy world, User will not wait until the page gets loaded. He will quit the website and moves for the another option. So once you have completed the website, you should go for page testing.

How you can test your page?
There are popular page load testing tools such as Yahoo Yslow, google's page test, Pingdom etc..

Yahoo Yslow
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. Based on your site performance yslow will give you a grade. You can find your page speed before cache and after cache of your css, javascript files.

Image Optimization:
You can compress you image with Yahoo's Smushit, if the graphics contains huge file size.

Statistics:
The statistical graph will show you the http request and total bytes used by the page with empty cache.

Yslow Tools
JSLint - Run JSLint on all JavaScript code in this page
All JS - Show all JavaScript code in this page
All JS Beautified - Show all JavaScript code in this page in an easy to read format
All JS Minified - Show all JavaScript code in this page in a minified (no comments or white space) format
All CSS - Show all CSS code in this page
All Smush.it - Run Smush.it on all image components in this page
Printable View - Show a printable view of grades, component lists, and statistics

Yslow comes along with firebug and they have lots of tools for optimization...

Google's Page Test:
Page Speed is an Firefox3/Firebug Add-on. Web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

I have not used google's page speed, but heard that it is also good as yslow. They have also got tool for images (just like smushit), css, javascripts etc. for more information, please use this link, Google page test.

Pingdom:
Pingdom is a website, provides free tools for webmaster. You can submit your url to check the load speed for your website. They will provide you information on load time, internal objects, external objects, script size, css size, html size, plugins, redirection if any and much more...

Permalink to this test
You can have the permanent link to the test made so that you can check at any time. You can also email this reports to your managers, friends etc...

How it works
The page load test is done by checking the complete html page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, etc...). The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. The statistics will show you the starting time, connection made and bytes read along with the url and its size take by it.

Test your uptime:
They also provide you a 30 days free trail to test your page and also give you the option for sms and email alerts to your site.

So check for optimization for your web pages, which will help in many ways...