YSlow for Firebug

Jeff Mancuso August 29th

Although it isn’t the newest news, it is new to me.

I recently found YSlow, a nice plugin to Firebug [easily the best Firefox plugin ever]. Made by Yahoo, it plugs in some nice features to help you gauge and optimize performance based on an arbitrary set of rules for high performance sites.

  1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
  2. Use a Content Delivery Network
  3. Add an Expires Header
  4. Gzip Components
  5. Put CSS at the Top
  6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
  7. Avoid CSS Expressions
  8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
  9. Reduce DNS Lookups
  10. Minify JavaScript
  11. Avoid Redirects
  12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
  13. Configure ETags

I’ve been using it lately to optimize load times on our site and it has helped quite a bit, if for nothing else than being a convenient way to actually measure load times. In particular, it pointed out some laziness on our part in regards to rule #6 and rule number #1. It helped quite a bit.

Nice screencast here.

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