Why your web site is slow?

If your web site is taking forever to load, half of your visitors will leave the page without even having a glimpse of what you have to offer. No matter how hard we work on our content, it will just be a waste of energy as most visitors will not stick around till it get loaded.

I, myself am guilty of not having fast loading web pages and I started working on it recently. I decided to share something very useful I found during this process. It is Yahoo’s Yslow firefox Add-on.

YSlow analyzes web pages and recommends ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Yahoo’s performance team has identified 34 rules that determines the performance of a web page. Yslow analyzes 22 of these 34 rules which are testable. They have discovered that a web page’s performance can be increased by up to 50% following these rules.

1. Minimize HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put StyleSheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript and CSS
11. Avoid Redirects
12.Remove Duplicate Scripts
13.Configure ETags
14.Make AJAX Cacheable
15. Use GET for AJAX Requests
16. Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
17. No 404s
18. Reduce Cookie Size
19. Use Cookie-Free Domains for Components
20.Avoid Filters
21. Do Not Scale Images in HTML
22.Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable

Yslow give points on how your web site is measured on each rule and gives an overall grade for the complete web page.

You can start optimizing your web pages according to the grades given. If you are not sure of how to follow a certain rule you can always search for the term and find valuable resources. I got an “F” grade ( worst) when I installed this yesterday and managed to move up a grade during the past 24 years.

Yslow comes with some other usable tools which will help you analyze your pages easily. For an example, All JS Minified tool collects all external and inline JavaScript and removes comments and white space to decrease the size of the scripts. You can replace your JavaScript with the minified version to improve performance of the web page.

If you click on All Smush.it tool, Smush.it will be run on all the image components on the page. This tool will tell you which images can be optimized and will create a zip file with the optimized images. Likewise there are number of tools and reports comes with this add-on which will make your life more easy as a web entrepreneur.

Download Yslow here. It comes with the best price tag. 100% FREE.