5 Apps to speed up your website

While doing the redesign for 68 Classifieds site I found lots of useful tools that helped me speed up the site. Some of these tools are so great I felt the need to share them.

PHP Speedy

PHP Speedy is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages. PHP Speedy automatically joins together all the appropriate files and compressed them, greatly reducing the load time of the page. This does take a little work to get it setup properly but I seen a big improvement.
» Visit PHP Speedy

Smush It

Image optimization is an art that not many people master. There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but “under the hood” a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Saving bytes has never been so easy - you point us in the right direction, and we’ll do the rest for you. A ZIP archive with optimized images will be generated for you.
» Visit Smush It

Clean CSS

This is a css compression tool that will take a style sheet and compress it into an almost unreadable compressed form. If you do use this always keep an uncompressed version of the file in case you want to make changes later.
» Visit Clean CSS

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
» Visit YSlow

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. This extension plus the web developer tool bar are two that I use on a daily bases..
» Visit Firebug