Why your web site is slow?

create a blog rss feed

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.

why my web site is loading slow

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.

Create a blog like this and start earning money.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

13 Responses to “Why your web site is slow?”
HP Server Support Posted on January 15, 2010 at 11:02 pm

I dont know, well i didnt, but i do now. I shall get to work on speeding it up. Thanks

Chinese Posted on January 16, 2010 at 8:53 pm

Thanks for sharing such a useful information. I am definitely going to workout this problem.

Carico Posted on January 22, 2010 at 2:20 am

Interesting article. I think all of us could use a faster web page. Thanks for sharing!

Mega How to Posted on February 13, 2010 at 4:30 am

Which I had found these tips soon, my site is so much faster now for this. Thanks

Car Audio Stereo Posted on March 2, 2010 at 2:07 pm

That is quite intesting post. Thanks for sharing.

gallery 802 Posted on March 2, 2010 at 4:11 pm

Good description, thank you for providing the information.

farhan Posted on March 27, 2010 at 1:10 pm

Thank for giving such good ideas and i am thinking to solve this problem

sms Posted on March 27, 2010 at 6:27 pm

i have take some action for improvement in my website and get more benefit after reading your post

Guaranteed Website Traffic Posted on April 16, 2010 at 7:12 am

Thanks for sharing such information. I will follow your advices so that can gain potential customers. Two thumbs up.

sheldon Posted on May 4, 2010 at 12:36 am

Very nice post. Loading time of a page is a factor that affects a viewers interest because if the page is slow, the visitor will be rating your site if it is good or not. It will be annoying for visitors if the pages loading time is very slow.

QNET Posted on May 28, 2010 at 3:34 pm

This is interesting article. I read this article. I think You put a lot of effort to create this article.Thanks for this post. This will help in my investments.

Interbilet Posted on June 16, 2010 at 3:34 pm

Checked all and you were right! Now my site is working better! Good luck!

Woodlands Divorce Lawyer Posted on September 23, 2010 at 1:46 am

Been doing the same mistakes for a long time until a friend helped me fix the loading problem in my clients sites and most of the fixes I made can be found in your post.

Post a Comment