WebPagetest.org and Page Speed

September 7, 2010 9:36 am | 2 Comments

Pat Meenan just blogged about Page Speed results now available in Webpagetest. This is a great step toward greater consistency in the world of web performance, something that benefits developers and ultimately benefits web users.

I’ve been spreading the meme about WPO – the industry emerging around web performance optimization. I contend that in the early evolution of a new technology industry it’s better to strive for standardization and worry about differentiation later once the technology movement is well established.

One area where WPO needs more standardization is performance analysis. There are numerous performance analysis tools available, including Page Speed, YSlow, AOL Pagetest, MSFast, VRTA, and neXpert. There’s some commonality across these tools, but the differences are what’s noticeable. To get a thorough performance scrubbing, web developers have no choice but to run multiple tools and sift through the different results trying to find the most important recommendations. It would be better for developers to have a more standard way of analyzing performance across environments.

The Page Speed SDK provides a path to achieve this. When it was released, I easily stood up a web page that produces a Page Speed performance analysis from HAR files. Today, Pat has integrated the same SDK into WebPagetest.org. With wider adoption of the Page Speed SDK, we’re moving to having a more consistent performance analysis regardless of what browser and development environment you work in.