Feb 16 2008
Major Speed Improvements Part 1
Hey guys i’ve found this new thing from yahoo called YSlow (for firefox)
Speed up your web pages with YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool.
After scanning a site you get a score out of 100 (100 being the best) and a rank from A to F
As an example here are the results for alexa.com’s top 5 sites by popularity/views:
1. yahoo.com = A (92)
2. youtube.com = C (72)
3. live.com = B (89)
4. google.com = A (94)
5. msn.com = C (72)
As you can see they are all high scores but not all sites are as high
Here is an example of 3 BIG sites with low scores:
digg.com = F (51)
torrentfreak.com = F (48)
mininova.org = F (55)
I’m sure you get the point by now and here’s what my current site scored:
paulpbaker.com = F (44)
paulpbaker.com/forum = F (49)
simpsonseps.com = D (63)
paulpbaker.info = F (41)
ppbhost.com = F (54)
After many many hours of correcting things like expires headers, gzip components, avoiding css expressions, reducing dns lookups, minify js, configure etags etc I finally finished tweaking and have some good results
In part 1 of this 2 parter I’ll be looking/tweaking the following sites:
simpsonseps.com, paulpbaker.info, ppbhost.com
In part 2 I’ll be tweaking the following sites:
paulpbaker.com, paulpbaker.com/forum (2 different scripts integrated together)
Here are the results for part 1:
simpsonseps.com = B (82)
paulpbaker.info = B (80)
ppbhost.com = B (84)
Some amazing results if you ask me and the only things i lose points for is not having a cluster of server to host the site on and having a few external scripts (like the shoutbox on simpsonseps.com for example) but nether will slow the site down so it’s an almost perfect score
Conclusions: The load time for ppbhost.com haven’t really change as it’s a very small site BUT for paulpbaker.info the results are amazingly fast and for simpsonseps.com there also really really improved!!
Lets see what i can do in part 2 for paulpbaker.com and paulpbaker.com/forum :)
Please Note: As well as using YSlow for analysing the sites I used a script called php speedy for compressing the javascript, css and to enable gzip compression on all php/html files
