Identifying Performance Issues

The first step to solving any web performance issue is to identify it. In many cases, this can be the hardest part of the increasing site performance. Simply knowing that your site is slow in some cases gives you few clues as to what might be wrong or what should be changed.

To begin, as mentioned in the previous chapter, you must start collecting performance data about your site. If you're using Google Analytics already, this is a great first step, but you should plan to collect additional, more granular information to help find out what may need tuning.

This chapter outlines resources that can be used in both a development and production environment from a defensive standpoint.