An obvious hurdle to troubleshoot your intranet is that it is not accessible from services on the web. For instance it’s quite hard for Pingdom’s Website speed test to reach your intranet and many more appreciated tools are useless. But don’t despair, there is still some great tools. Some of them act as plugins to your web browser, other is stand-alone applications for your computer.
Come along!
It’s worth mentioning that my book, Web Strategy for Everyone, also covers backend aspects of intranet performance optimization.
Speed test for your intranet
For reference when testing your intranet from a mobile device you can use the app Speedtest.net on Android phones and Speedtest for iOS. Some plugins for Firefox requires a plugin called Firebug – you can find Firebug here – which is of great use in other scenarios such as inspecting cookies etcetera.
l.o.r.i (Life-of-Request Info)
Lori is a plugin for Firefox. It shows initial latency (time before first byte), total load-time, page weight and number of connections for every page you visit.
Yahoo! YSlow
Analyses a page and give you suggestions on how to better the performance. Install as a plugin in Firefox. Requires the plugin Firebug.
Google PageSpeed
Google offers a browser plugin for both Firefox and Chrome to examine pagespeed factors of pages you can access with your browser (logged in, VPN, what-have-you).
Google PageSpeed for Chrome and Firefox »
IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit
If you happen to have a Windows Web Server you can install an extension called “IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit” to do local analysis of factors such as performance and SEO, and get a report of eventual issues.
Did I miss any of your favorite tools?