It can be really difficult trying to quantify what a “slow website” really means. Its easy to spot a slow site but arriving at some metric that helps you monitor attempts at improving performance or better still, a tool which actually makes some sensible suggestions…
Well, now there is one by using a combination of Firefox addons:
FireBug - a general web developer type of tool
PageSpeed - an addon addon that not only measures page loading performance but gives you several suggestions on what could be improved and also what is working well
I am told that Google are now using performance metrics in their page scoring so these tools can even help your SEO efforts. If you are also trying to monitor the effects of a caching tool such as Squid or Varnish or even Apache in front of your website then also add livehttpheaders to your list of Firefox addons
