Page Speed Score [Update]

Back in May last year, I wrote a post about a new Firebug (for Firefox) Plug-in called Page Speed, that allowed you to test the load time of your website and get some useful tips on how to improve this.

This week, Google took that idea and extended it into an independent online tool, making it available for anyone on any browser. It uses a version of WebKit installed on a server to run the test (via the Chrome version of Page Speed Im guessing) to test your site and suggest improvements.

It seems to work in exactly the same way, and suggests the same kinds of things to improve your score, and has the same issues I pointed out last time, in that it marks you down for incorrect caching on Google Services you include on your page (Analytics in my case).

When I first ran the test on my site, I had dropped to 76/100, this was down to the javascript includes I had slowing things down, and the image caching wasn’t long enough. A couple of tweaks later and I’m now back up to 96/100 which is 3 above where I got to last year.

Read the Google post or start testing your site, please note tho, that as its being hosted on the Google Labs site, this could (as many have done before) disappear without warning. If it does I’ll update this post to reflect that.

Posted in Google, SEO, Tips n Tricks, Tools of the Trade | 2 Comments »

Google open a fresh pot

Google last night announced they have completed their migration to their new web indexing system known as ‘Caffeine’.

This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.

Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.

The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!

Image copyright of Google

There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine. But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.

You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog

Tags: caffeine, google, googlebot, search
Posted in Google, SEO, T'Internet News | No Comments »

Page Speed Score: 93/100

Google made a post the other day about “Me and site performance, sitting in a tree…” so I thought before we get to the “…k, i, s, s, i, n, g!” I should give her a run for her money, check she is good enough for me.

First thing the post suggest is to check out Site Performance in Webmaster tools, so off I went. When this first appeared in the Labs section of webmaster tools it was updating pretty regularly and was quite useful and as the graph shows helped me tweak a few things and improve the load time of the server. But it hasn’t been updated in a while now so isn’t very relevant or useful to me.

Next thing it suggests is to install Page Speed for Firebug and test my site. So thats what I did and I got Page Speed Score: 93/100! which is pretty impressive. So I thought next, 7% to go, what can I do to get to 100/100. Nothing it seems… All the suggestions the tool gave me were unsolvable and prevent anyone from getting top marks.

The first suggestion is to Leverage browser caching,
the file it advises me need to do this too is “http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js” which I cant do anything about.

The next suggestion is to Defer loading of JavaScript, “66.4% of the JavaScript loaded by this page had not been invoked by the time the onload handler completed” is smugly informs me.
- http://gavtaylor.co.uk 24 functions uncalled of 25 total functions
- http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js 154 functions uncalled of 243 total functions.

On closer examination the functions it reports on my site are actually from Firebug, which must be open for the test to run? catch 22 there!
And the analytic code again is from Google and I cant do anything about that.

The final suggestion is to Use efficient CSS selectors,
http://gavtaylor.co.uk/core/styles/styles.css has 12 very inefficient rules, 27 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 101 total rules.

This I can do something about and when I get a moment I will be re-coding my CSS file. But this wont improve my results more than 1 or 2 points.

So this unreachable target of 100/100 appears to be impossible. I could remove the Google code from my site which would resolve the Google plug-in issue but I cant run the test without having Firebug open so there will always be 24 out of 25 uncalled functions reported keeping me away from that 100/100 score.

So… will I be sitting in that tree, doing things I should not be?… No, not until they fix the issues with their testing tools anyway…

Update 4/4/11:

On Thursday (31st March), Google released an online version of their page speed tool, This new test works in the same way to the Firebug plugin but uses a version of webkit installed on a server. I have written a quick follow up post with links and my initial thoughts here.

Tags: firebug, google, page speed, performance, webmaster
Posted in Google, SEO, Tools of the Trade | 8 Comments »

where am I?…

No Im not lost, I was logged into my Google Web master tools this morning and saw that my number one search query on google that returned my site has changed to ‘Gavin Taylor’. So I decided to see where I am on various searches, then this time next year I can search again and see how I’ve faired.

google.co.uk
search term	search type	search position
gavin	web	unknown (page 50+)
gavin	uk	page 43, position 5
gavin taylor	web	page 1, position 3
gavin taylor	uk	page 1, position 2
gav taylor	web/uk	page 1, position 1
php developer	web/uk	unknown (page 50+)
php developer manchester	web	page 3, position 9
php developer manchester	uk	page 4, position 1

not bad results there really, not much to done on searches for my name, going to focus on php developer I think

bing.com
search term	search type	search position
gavin	web	unknown (page 50+)
gavin	uk	unknown (page 50+)
gavin taylor	web	page 1, position 3
gavin taylor	uk	page 1, position 2
gav taylor	web	page 1, position 4
gav taylor	uk	page 1, position 2
php developer	web/uk	unknown (page 50+)
php developer manchester	web	page 2, position 8
php developer manchester	uk	page 8, position 9

interestingly on the web search for ‘gav taylor’, my twitter feed came top.
again searches for my name do quite well, confirms I need to improve seo for ‘php developer’

Will be interesting to see where I end up for these searches in Feb 2011

Tags: bing, developer, gav taylor, gavin, google, manchester, php, SEO, taylor, webmaster tools
Posted in SEO, Site Updates | No Comments »

preventing SPAM

Since I moved to my VPS, one of the biggest problems I’ve had is with spam. Not just with my email account but everyone who’s email accounts Im hosting on the VPS have all seen a sharp increase in spam emails.

On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day! I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.

My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.

The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.

I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.

I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.

The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.

All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.

Tags: Brent Meisher, grey-listing, Plesk, spam, spamassassin, spamdyke, vps
Posted in CSS, Javascript, Other, PHP, SEO | 1 Comment »