Time for another YSlow rule. This week we will be looking at rule number 8—avoid CSS expressions. My knowledge about CSS is very limited, and I’ve always seen CSS as a format for specifying style information rather than an actual programming language. It turns out that you can…
This week I have chosen to combine rule numbers 6 and 7. Why? Because they focus on pretty much the same thing: where to put style sheet and script references. According to rule number 6, you should put all your styling in the head section of your HTML document. The…
Last week I blogged about Google making Page Speed available for Chrome users. This week Google surprises me again, by doing Page Speed Online. Page Speed Online is pretty much just an online edition of Page Speed for Firefox and Chrome. The funny thing is, that I just a couple…
We all know it: zipping is a great way to compress the size of a file. This rule also applies on the web. Zipping responses from a server is natively implemented in the HTTP version 1.1 standard, which is why you don’t have any excuse left not to…
This week I’m taking a little detour from the YSlow rule series. Earlier today, Google announced Page Speed for Chrome [http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/page-speed-for-chrome-and-in-40.html] . As mentioned in a previous post, Chrome users have been limited to Google Speed Tracer, but now they also have the…
We have reached rule number 4 in our journey into the exciting world of the YSlow rule set. Rule number 4 is all about caching. We have tackled the caching area a bit in some of the previous posts, but in this post I will dig more into this important…
In this post I will try to explain to you the idea behind a content delivery network or CDN. I think that the Yahoo documentation on this rule is a bit confusing. So here’s my attempt to explain YSlow rule #2: use a content delivery network. To explain the…
One of the rules mentioned in most performance-analyzing tools is “Combine your JavaScript.” Basically this means that instead of this: <script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/one.js></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/two.js><…
In the following twenty-two posts, I will look into all the rules in YSlow. This is a pretty comprehensive plan, but I will try to keep the posts short and precise. All rules are pretty good documented in the YSlow documentation here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html. I…
In the last three posts, I’ve looked at tools for optimizing performance on a website. This week I will show you a nice performance-related feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool from Google that provides different tools for webmasters, such as submitting a sitemap,…