Google "Page Speed"
 

So since now Google uses the loading times of a site as a variable for ranking, they released a "Page Speed" add on for FireBug that basically analyzes your site with tips on how to improve it.

Now, I just ran this tool and found a plethora of issues. Problem is, some of these are just core vBulletin things, and I am not sure how I could tweak it?

Here are just 2 (out of many more) examples:

http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/1580/pagespeed.png




http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/6981/pagespeed2.png


What are your thoughts?

This only really matters if your site is particularly slow. In the past, we used to live or die by page loading times - but fortunately these days most internet connections are so fast that for a standard website they will appear to load pretty much instantly anyway, so load times only become important for video or music streaming sites.

If google reports a load time of 3-5 seconds for most pages then that really isn't that bad. If you're looking at 5-10 second on every page then that might want addressing as their is a systematic problem going on, in so much as your server is either struggling or its connection to the internet is slow (or too small to cope with the number of connections).

Hammering out the ineffeciencies in vBulletin may squeeze a little bit of lag out of the load times, but really if the site is slow its probably the hardware or connection that need addressing not vbulletin.

NickyDee, thats a nice thought, probably the one that lead to how much of a travesty VB4 is on performance. There is a systematic problem going on, and its VB4 itself. VB4 is so slow that we need to do EVERYTHING we can to speed it up for our users; and if caching is what we can do, then it is our responsibility as administrators to do it.

Try adding this to the top of your htaccess file...

Jaxel, thank you for that. Unfortunately, I do not use Apache, instead I use a IIS7 server. Would you be able to tell instruct me on the proper format for a web.config file (instead of the above .htaccess)

Thank you very much.

Is this correct? (as far as we are able to know something about that)

If you're worried about the speed of your website - and you should be! - read this great series on website loading and rendering speed by ex-Yahoo, now Google engineer.
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

This is in fact a great list. Thank you very much.
What is the best tool to measure the speed in your eyes?
And which tool is best to show the most important things to correct for performance?
I've got the yslow and the page speed add-on of firefox. Are they good?
Or is there something even better?