Improve Your Website Performance

I recently presented at a conference with Tenni Theurer, Product Optimization Manager, Yahoo Inc. I spoke about building a loyal blog audience and Tenni spoke about optimizing websites. She mentioned that most web developers spend most of their time optimizing code on the backend, the code, the database queries etc. However, through three years of research at Yahoo, they discovered that 95% of the time, website optimization needs to be performed on the “front end”. They came up with 13 rules for testing web page performance:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

They also developed a web page analysis tool called YSlow that allows you to test your own web pages for performance. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.

Installation Process

1. Install Firebug
2. Install Firefox add-on

How to use

1. In Firefox, go to the website you want to analyze
2. Once the Yslow firefox add-on is installed, you will see the following on the bottom left corner of your Firefox browser:
3. Click on YSlow (see above image)
4. View the graded results of your chosen website

For more information on how to use the tool, watch a screencast created by Yahoo.

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