Optimize your webpages with YSlow

Often times in the fight to develop web pages quickly we forget how important it is to make sure our page is optimized to the best of your ability.  Simple things like placing CSS and Javascript files externally are an easy and well known example of page optimization but many times we can do more. Yahoo! has provided a set of recommendations on their site called Best Practices for Speeding up your Website. This list spans all areas of a page that can be tweaked with to minimize page size and loading time.  Now many of these recommendations have their downsides as well but overall I found some good ideas on improving my web page performance.

The obvious question now is how do I make sure I am complying to all these best practices while I am developing.  Well luckily Yahoo! has provided a very well integrated addon for Mozilla Firefox called YSlow. YSlow provides automatic feedback in your browser status bar for every page you load.  It gives a performance grade (very strict) on each page along with the page size and load time.  I find this very helpful while developing so I can quickly glance at these stats every time my page loads.  YSlow also provides a detailed list of every HTTP request made when loading the page. This is nice so you can see how long it takes to download certain images or script files.  Improvements can then be made to cache those large images if they tend not to change often or with a script maybe minify it before deploying it.  Lastly this addon provides a nice way to view overall stats of the page including images, css, and JS downloaded.

Next time you go searching for Firefox addons be sure to pick this one up!