Improve your page load speed with YSlow
Since the widespread up-take of broadband around the world, monitoring the time it takes for your website design to load, has taken a back seat.
With the shear amount of users now accessing your website through mobile devices; load speed is once again becoming an issue of higher importance. With Google, acknowledging this in a recent revision of the search algorithm, you can be sure that page load time will be an important factor for a while to come.
Reducing your Page load time
It’s OK realising the importance of page load times, but where do you begin with starting reducing them. For many years now, I’ve been more than aware of things like optimising images, and using CSS where possible to replace block images, but where do you go after this?
YSlow, is an extremely useful extension that has been developed on top of the firebug add-on, giving you not only an in-depth breakdown and grading of your web page, but also, some very useful ideas on how to improve the overall performance rating.
YSlow is a FREE add-on and can be downloaded here
Leading by Example
As with any great leader, Google are practising what they preach, as a recent road test of the Google Homepage using YSlow, shows the maximum grading available, (well, I wouldn’t expect anything else from such a content minimal web page.)
Google certainly practice what they preach!
