Recently I had talked about a tool for Firefox users called Firebug in my post about optimizing your blog. Today Yahoo released an extension to Firebug (not Firefox) called YSlow.

What is YSlow?
YSlow actually helps to optimize your blog or website. It grades components of your design from a grading scale of A to F which is based on compliance to Yahoo’s Performance Rules. It was initially used internally by yahoo but today it has been publicly released. You need to have Firebug installed and then go here to download the Yslow extension.

YSlow

How Does it work?
The tool actually sits in your toolbar as you can see above and once clicked on, it will start to collect data from the page you are viewing. It then creates the performance, components and statistics reports. I have provided some screenshots of the different features below.

YSlow      YSlow      YSlow

YSlow Features
Aside from the Performance grading scale, it has a stats tab that lets you see how your page size varies when you have a visitor with an empty cache compared to a return visitor. There is also a component tab that lets you see every component present in a website. There is also a tools section that contains things such as JSLink by Douglas Crockford and two separate components that let you see all the CSS and JavaScript present on a page.

Final Score
Well as I said earlier, the tool grades a website based on several performance factors. I decided to put the tool to the test on several highly popular websites including my own blog.
Yahoo – A (93)
Google – A (99)
Ms. Danielle - D (61)
Mr. Gary Lee – F (59)
Derek Semmler – F (54)
ProBlogger – F (50)
DoshDosh – F (48)
ShoeMoney – F (48)
Jeff Kee – F (48)
John Cow – F (46)
Carl Ocab – F (40)
Guy Kawasaki – F (38)
John Chow – F (35)
Enkay Blog – F (35)

I can’t really say how well the tool worked mainly because the only one to pass from my list of bloggers, aside from Google and Yahoo, was Ms. Danielle! Even then, I visited about 25 blogs and websites, and so far only 3 have passed. The tool does give you details on why you actually failed in certain areas and that can help you improve the performance of your blog. I will be looking into this to see how I can increase my grade but until then, I will have to settle for the score I have received. If you install the tool, let me know how well your blog ranks or you can leave me a comment with your url and I will visit the blog myself and let you know! Thanks for reading!