In this week’s web design video, we take a look at Yahoo’s YSlow extension for Firefox. YSlow is a fantastic free tool for web designers who wish to scrutinize the contributing factors to a web page’s load time. As you may know, optimising the load time, or ‘speed’ of a web page has multiple benefits for both the website owner and front-end users
- Faster loading web pages improve the usability of a website
- Less pressure is put on your server and bandwidth
- And also – faster web-pages are a contributing factor in organic search rankings
How to get YSlow
To start using the YSlow extension, firstly you’ll need the latest version of Firefox. Secondly, you will also need the popular, free web development extension called Firebug. If you’re already familiar with Firebug, YSlow is great because it simply plugs straight into Firebug.
Once you have Firefox and Firebug ready to go, simply go to YSlow extension page on the Mozilla Addons page.
it has been suggested to put the scripts at the bottom of the page. As you mentioned in the blog a 1/3 of the file size is your jquery library, this in turn would allow the page to load faster. I believe its partly the reason why Google analytic code is now in the head so it can give a more efficient reading of your site.
look forward to your response…