How Fast Is Your Website?

Yahoo recently updated one of their tools for grading and optimizing websites.  It’s called YSlow, and it checks your site for several different decisions and tools which you (or your web designer) may have implemented.

YSlow is an add on to the Firebug tool which is a Firefox extension – so at this point, you can’t run it in any other browser, however both Firefox and Firebug are free tools so there is no cost to you other than time.

YSlow is nice because it rates things on a scale of A to F, for each of numerous categories.  It also gives a numeric score for the overall grade. By having it calculate where the biggest improvements could come from – it lets you quickly find areas to optimize. With the previous version, I took one website which had a horrible score of 18 (out of 100), and in an afternoon with some minor changes, brought it up to a 32.

Other websites I’ve taken from a 55-60 range and gotten them into the 80s – usually within just a few days, depending upon the complexity of the site.

Users perceive your site partially in how fast it responds – so the faster your site, the more likely they are to make purchases or other related decisions, so optimizing your site’s speed can be very important to the health of your site.