Yahoo’s YSlow – Blog Optimization Tool
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.
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 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!
woohoo!! check me out, throwing off the curve! yea!!
looks like the scores from the intro java class i took in college when it was the first year they offered a java programming course. i think in ‘98 =O i got an A- with a 12 out of 25. that class was HARD
funny that google scored higher than yahoo
Thats true! You totally blew the rest of us out of the water! It does remind me of my operations management course at university, where getting a 32 out of a 100 isnt bad news at all!
What’s my score?
You passed! You got a D (64) that means you flew past Ms. Danielle! Good job!
eek! nick, you’re screwing with my curve!!
man .. i barely failed . . . but it looks like i rather be with the Fs than anybody else .. .
Yeah, I noticed that a lot of the top blogs were down in the ditch, in terms of grading! Glad to have you join me and the rest of us on the failing boat!
What’s my grade?
You joined the me with the rest of the failing group. You got an F (24) !
That is an interesting tool and I will have to give it a try on my home machine.
Of those blogs listed, I think most of them are running WordPress so maybe there is something there that is being rated inefficient by WordPress. It could be the result of plugins or even a variance depending on the theme. I’ll have to review my personal finance blog to see how that compares to my personal blog.
It will be interesting to see if any of your tweaks improve your rating. This could be a great source of informational posts on how to improve the performance of your blog.
Hey Derek,
Thanks for the comment. The tool is actually quite good. I did notice that there were some small errors such as wrongly placed div tags and by fixing one of them my ranking went up by one. I will be fixing more of those to see how much it really goes up. I did some tests on some other popular websites and here are those results.
Ades Blog – PR7 – F (48)
Anandtech – PR6 – D (54)
Sitepoint – PR8 – D (64)
Ha Yahoo’s desperate plea to catch up with Google… Well, not bad – this thing got the attention of bloggers.
Sure did! Jeff, interested in being part of my Page Rank chain? Check it out! I’ll be happy to add you to the list!
I wonder what my site did, before and after the design change? I think I will download that to test it out!
I just downloaded this one, but I won’t be able to restart firefox right now. Will check it out later. Subscribing to the comments of this post will remind me if I forget
Okay, here is mine. Anyways my firefox crashed so I could restart.
Performance Grade: F (43)
You beat me! haha
Great info! I don’t use IE, please check my score for me:) Thanks!