Use YSlow Firefox add-on to analyze the performance of your web site
Posted on August 3, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Make sure to read other posts from the FireFox YSlow series!
- Use YSlow Firefox add-on to analyze the performance of your web site
- How I increased by blog’s load speed by 50% using YSlow
YSlow is a FireFox add-on from Yahoo that you can use to help analyze the performance of your web site and determine why your web pages are slow to load based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow integrates with Firebug Firefox web development add-on, so you’ll need to install that first.
YSlow will generate an overall performance scorecard for your page, a complete HTML/HTTP summary, a list of components on the page, and other cool tools like JSLint. There are 13 rules for high performance web sites:
- Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires Header
- Gzip Components
- Put CSS at the Top
- Move Scripts to the Bottom
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Minify JavaScript
- Avoid Redirects
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Configure ETags
According to Yahoo, this tool has helped to increase the performance of about 50 Yahoo sites by 25 to 50%. Once installed, browse to the page you want to analyze, click on Tools, then FireBug, and choose Open FireBug.
You’ll now see a docked bar across the bottom where you can inspect every aspect of the web site. Go ahead and click on YSlow at the far right. There are four main tabs in YSlow: Performance, Stats, Components, and Tools. Click on Performance to get your report card score:
As you can see from above, my blog is not quite optimized yet!! OUCH! I will certainly be working on this problem very soon! You get a score for each of those thirteen performance points. Click on Stats and you’ll see exactly how many style sheets, JavaScript files, and images that were loaded. You’ll get the total size of the page and the total number of HTTP requests.
Click on Components to get a list of what each request was, the response time, the size, and the eTag.
Finally, under tools you can use JSLint to find any problems with your JavaScript files. All JS and All CSS combines all of the separate files into one file. The Printable View option is very convenient since it puts all of the data from all of the tabs together for easy printing.
Overall, a very essential add-on if you have a web site and want to optimize it so that web pages load as fast as possible.
[tags]website performance, measure website performance, analyze website performance, load website faster, increase website performance, webpage loads slowly, website performance tool, yslow, firebug, firefox add-on[/tags]
» Filed Under Web Site Tips
Related Posts
- 7 free SEO tools to analyze and optimize your website for speed and compatibility
- How I increased by blog’s load speed by 50% using YSlow
- View slow loading web pages faster using Finch
- How to Speed Up Mozilla Firefox
- How to setup multiple home pages in Firefox and IE
Comments
5 Responses to “Use YSlow Firefox add-on to analyze the performance of your web site”
-
Pingbacks
-
7 free SEO tools to analyze and optimize your website for speed and compatibility Says:
[...] articles on YSlow, one about how it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% and another on how to setup YSlow. Make sure to read them and install Firefox just for this [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Undoubtedly the post is simply suburb. But I would like to add an addition to provide the same stats for any ideal web site having the best performance so that one can compare between the real and the actual loading time.
Thank you for this excellent post. I am a novice at this but I found performance tuning of my blog very easy with your help.
Cheers
This is a really great tool for determining website load speed. I also use Page Speed from Google. I have decreased the load time of my site dramatically using these tools.
Very good article. I also saw you have another article on YSlow which has more details. I’ve used YSlow along with Page Speed from Google to optimize the loading time for my website.