So we have to start somewhere and my pretty normal plain vanilla WordPress install rates as:

• Google pagespeed tool : Page Speed Score of 27 (out of 100)
• Yslow: Grade B Overall performance score 80 Ruleset applied: YSlow(V2)

My total weight in Yslow is 340.8K

1 HTML/Text 5.2K
4 JavaScript File 261.7K
2 Stylesheet File 18.4K
4 CSS Image 46.5K
2 Image 1.2K
1 Favicon 0.2K
3 undefined 7.3K

Which means I forgot to switch to a minified version of jQuery when i made the site live. That is an easy one. Switching to minified jQuery 91.7kb loses me 156.3kb.

Making me a much better total weight of 186.9K

So rerunning those tests I now get a more respectable

• Google pagespeed tool : Page Speed Score of 61 (out of 100)
• Yslow: Grade B Overall performance score 80 Ruleset applied: YSlow(V2)

To be continued … there is a lot more

A faster website is a good thing for a number of reasons.

• People have short attention spans – Why wait for your site to load when there are maybe 9 others on a search engine results page that do load quickly.
• Its considerate – not everyone has the greatest browser, fastest computer or speediest internet connection. You don’t want to close the door in their face.
• Search engines probably take it into account as one of the factors in their ranking engines. Google have it as a feature in webmaster tools.
• It makes you look professional – you wouldn’t be late for a meeting or take an age to reply to a call. In the same way you don’t want your website to look bumbling.
• Slow websites are frustrating – and you don’t want to be frustrating potential clients.

Find out how fast your site is

You can use yslow or page speed browser extensions but its probably easier to start with an online tool like Google page speed or webpagetest.org where you can choose the location to test from.

Saying that I need to increase the speed of this site :)