Don’t Keep Your Visitors Waiting: Monitor Your Blog’s Performance

I am always concerned with the performance of my blog to the point where I try to test the performance on at least a weekly basis. My quest to make my blog perform at its best led me to use CloudFlare to cache and send my static content.

There could be any number of reasons why performance for a blog, or website, decreases and many times you may be able to find the problem and fix it. Other times, such as the decrease in performance on your host’s servers, are out of your control besides alerting your host. In this post I’ll explain the tests I perform to test out the performance of my blog so I can find where my blog performance can be tweaked.

Blog Performance Monitoring Tools

There are several tools, and methods, you can use to monitor the performance of you blog. The good news is that they are all free to use, so you can run them whenever you wish.

Manually Loading Your Blog

This isn’t a tool, but is more of a method. While not scientific, or accurate, in anyway, this method basically requires you to access your blog to measure the performance. You may be able to determine if you blog is loading slowly by simply visiting it on a regular basis. If you do find that it does seem slow, you may want to check out the other tools listed below. The tools below may be able to help pinpoint why your blog is loading slowly.

YSlow

This is a great FireFox extension to install. It allows you to analyze the performance of you blog, and also provide some recommendations on what you can do to increase performance. This extension allows you to see what is loaded by the web page, information about the resources, and also what will be loaded from cache.

Google’s Chrome Web Browser

Web browsers are starting to include tools for developers to analyze a web page, both to see the structure (HTML and CSS) of the page as well as the performance. Google’s Chrome browser has quite a lot of information regarding what is loaded by your blog. It is quite extensive and worth checking out if you use Chrome as your web browser. You can easily access the data by right-clicking anywhere on a web page and select “Inspect Element” and then select “Network” from the top of the bottom panel.

Pingdom Tools

This is a free performance tool that you can use online that will help take a look at what is loaded by your blog and roughly how long a request will take. Pingdom tools doesn’t go into great detail, but does provide a summary of how many objects were loaded. The details display helps in determining which of the objects loaded by your blog took the longest to download.

In addition to the tools, you can also sign up with Pingdom to monitor you blog’s performance and downtime. You will be provided with stats and charts with regards to how your blog is performing.

The above graph shows the effect of CloudFlare on my blog’s performance as can be seen by the drop in response time between “11/04/2010” and “11/26/2010” in the graph.

I regularly analyze the performance on my blog to ensure that my visitors are waiting for a page to load. I recently talked about how you can use CloudFlare to increase a site’s performance, but you must first analyze why your blog is slow and then take the appropriate action.

Do you monitor your blog’s performance? If you do, what steps to you take to measure the performance?