I found this excellent article which discusses in detail the best practices how you can speed up your website. Have a look, you won’t be disappointed.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

If you are into web development then you surely must have heard of Firebug. Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. It is one of the most popular and downloaded Firefox Addons because it can inspect and edit HTML, tweak CSS to perfection, visualize CSS metrics, monitor network activity, debug and profile Javascript, quickly find errors, explore the DOM and much more.

Well now with the help of Google, it can do much more. Google has introduced a Firefox Addon called Page Speed which works along side Firebug. Install both of these Addons if you are using Firefox and follow the instructions in this page. Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

I personally recommend using Page speed. I have used it on this site as well and I think it has drastically improved my site performance.

Download Firebug

Download Page Speed

If you want find out what’s the size of your webpage, how long does it take to load or how can you optimize it, then you are in for a treat. I found this great free online tool that will do everything listed above and more. Just enter the name of the site you want to analyze at websiteoptimization.com and voila, you get instant and precise statistics like Total HTTP Requests, Total Size, Object size totals, External Object quantity and Download times. You also get a detailed tabular list showing each and every object found in the webpage such as images, CSS, scripts or flash and its size. It also displays the number of bytes that could be saved from each file if gzip compression was used. Last but definitely not the least it also shows a very helpful Analysis and Recommendations section which summarizes the analysis and advices you on how you can optimize your website.