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There are a few really good website performance analysis tools that are available, Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo YSlow being just two of them.

The problem with the web application versions of this tool, like Google PageSpeed Insights, is that they require your website(s) to be publicly available. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for those of us that develop and maintain websites that are not exposed to the public (behind a firewall). The Yahoo YSlow plugin works well, but can be buggy at times, I'm still unable to get it working in Firefox, yet it works fine in Chrome. As far as Yahoo YSlow goes, it works well, but requires you to install the software in a browser and run the report manually. And like Google PageSpeed Insights, does not provide a way to save the report as a file or show a history of reports and neither, as far as I can tell, be automated.

Do any of you know of any pieces of software, either installable on a machine, or configurable as web application that can be utilized within an intranet to provide similar, if not the same level of analysis and reporting that the Google PageSpeed Insights or Yahoo YSlow plugin tools offer?

Ideally this software should:

  1. Analyze a website from both a desktop and mobile perspective and showcase the areas that are performing well and those that are not along with a simple grade to describe the sites overall performance.
  2. Provide recommended enhancements that should be made to a website when performance issues are found. Possible performance issues being, but not limited to:
    • Source code that is not minified (JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
    • Image optimization (not using sprites, large filesizes, etc.)
    • Web server not compressing content being delivered
    • Browser caching not being used correctly
    • Poor Scripting Practices
    • External resource issues (linking to external resources that are not performing well)
  3. Can be automated such that on a determined schedule, it reads a source list of website URLs and automatically runs the performance analysis on said sites and catalogs the report with the sites performance grade.
  4. Provides charting to show how a sites performance grade has changed over time.
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  • The Firefox/Firebug/Google Page Speed plugin does allow most of those (not good enough to use it as answer) but it does let you fully anaylze an intranet site with no live internet connection and export as a JSON format. Does pretty well on #1 and #2 fails at #3 and #4 unless you write you own script to analyze log file etc. etc.
    – Nick Dickinson-Wilde
    Feb 11, 2014 at 21:36
  • @Nick-BriarMoonDesign, Thank you for the recommendation, I'll take a look at it.
    – Anil
    Feb 11, 2014 at 21:43
  • I was just about to put Google Speed as an answer since it works online or offline. But then read the comments @Nick-BriarMoonDesign
    – Mohammed Joraid
    Feb 12, 2014 at 4:01
  • It is my favourite quick - YSlow (via Firefox/Firebug also works offline but I don't like it as much (though I couldn't give a very cogent argument for why)) - and if there was any built in reporting capabilities I would certainly have said it was a good enough answer but with 2 out of 4 not quite. Unfortunate - but perhaps someone will write a automator for it someday and it will become a good answer
    – Nick Dickinson-Wilde
    Feb 12, 2014 at 4:09
  • Meta tags are not tags from meta site, but too board, sensless tags. blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags
    – leventov
    Feb 12, 2014 at 23:57

2 Answers 2

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There are a lot of great tools out there for analysing an Intranet Website, but I think that first, we should not bypass the basic tools already built in our browsers!

To better express this affirmation, let's disable my Internet connection and just open a local page, delivered by the web server installed on my own computer. It's only a simple page that you will see a bit later!

First, because I'm using Chrome, I prefer to perform a full network utilization a web page performance audit, by opening the Developer Tools with the Ctrl + Shift + I key shortcut:

enter image description here

Once the audit is over, I see there is a lot of work to do on this page:

enter image description here

The console shows messages about some deprecated items:

enter image description here

Let's save the profiles for later comparisons:

enter image description here

And the Timeline data:

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Or maybe you want to see how long takes for every resource to load:

enter image description here

But wouldn't be better if you'll pay a visit to Chrome Developer Tools to learn more about all the functionalities? (In the mean time I'll restore my Internet connection to save this message!)

Once your Intranet page performs well into the... browser (it seems logical, isn't it?) you can publish it on the web, to access all the other great online tools, and to achieve even more speed performance.

(Developer Tools can be found in Chrome, Safari and Opera, but I'm sure there are great similar tools available for other browsers)

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  • 1
    Thank you for the writeup; however, my intention was not to purposely bypass the browser's builtin tools, and I understand many of them perform very well. My goal here is to find a deployable solution that can be automated so that little interaction from a person is required and so that at any moment, if say a manager, team lead, project manager, or anyone for that matter, wanted to check the performance status of a website on the intranet, they could visit a location where the reports that are generated by the tool are automatically deployed and so that we can track performance progress.
    – Anil
    Feb 12, 2014 at 21:22
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My tool of choice is a private instance of webpagetest.org:

  • All tests can be fully customized with own scripts,
  • you can run multiple tests at the same time,
  • can do butch tests with own url lists.

...and many benefits more.

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