You should test the load times of your websites pretty often, especially if you’re regularly adding
content, plugins, scripts, or testing new themes. Another major reason for having a quick-loading site,
besides keeping the visitors on your site, is getting visitors to your site in the first place by way of free
search engine traffic. For example, Google considers your site’s load speed whenever it decides where in
the search results to put your site.
Many tools you can use to run these load speed tests are free. One such tool is called YSlow. YSlow is
from the development department of Yahoo. And in this video, I’m going to give you a tour of YSlow and
cover some of the major components that will help you get the most out of your site speed testing with
this free tool and what to avoid whenever you’re using YSlow. Now YSlow has developed 23 different
testable rules related to the optimum load speed of a web page. And whenever you run the test on your
web page – which we’re going to do here in just a second – it compares what you have to the optimum
way things should be and gives you a score based on the results of that test.
Now before we run that test, I do want to point out that each one of these is a clickable link that will
take you to a page that will explain more about each one of these testable rules. And I want to show you
some things to consider when installing YSlow on your particular browser. As you can see here, it is
available for many of the major browsers, but there’s a biggie missing, and that is Internet Explorer. It
does not work with Internet Explorer. And do not use these links to install YSlow on your particular
browser because they may not work. For example, with Firefox, it tells you that you need to first install
Firebug and then install YSlow as an add-on to Firebug. Now Firebug is a great plugin that works
perfectly for developers, but YSlow does not work. And if you click on the Firebug link up here, it opens
up. And one of the tabs to Firebug is YSlow. And I can just click on any one of these links in here. And by
the way, I’m clicking. And click on the Run Test button. Nothing is working. This, I think, is a result of
some of the updates to Firefox that YSlow has not kept up with.
So how you install YSlow on Firefox, or for that matter, on any of those browsers, is do not click on these
links for installation. Instead, click on the link up here in the top-right corner, because YSlow recognizes
magically what browser you’re in. For example, right now, I’m in the Firefox browser. And I’m in the
Chrome browser here. And it recognizes that I’m in the Chrome browser. And if we click on this button
up here on the top-right corner, install YSlow, it gives me this pop-up. Now I’ve already got YSlow
installed. That’s why this button here is not clickable. But if we come on back to my Firefox browser,
click on this, it brings us to the page on mobile installation instructions. You’ve got option 1 or option 2.
But the one that we want is the one at the bottom here to add this to our bookmarks toolbar. And you
do that by just left-click, hold, and drag that blue button up to your bookmarks bar. By the way, you
need to have your bookmarks bar showing. And if you come on up here to View -> Toolbars, make sure
your bookmarks toolbar is check. Otherwise, you won’t see it up there. And now YSlow is working. Now
it’s a little more limited in Firefox than it is in Chrome, and I’ll demonstrate that right now.
Let’s run a quick test here. Click on Bookmark. This pops up. Click on Run Test. And by the way, you can
see you’ve got these different tabs here. And as soon as you click on one of these tabs, it’s going to start
running a test. That’s why I haven’t clicked on those yet to show those to you. But you have here various
rulesets by default. You’ve got three rulesets.
And the V2 test for all 23 of those rulesets we talked about a second ago. The classic V1 only tests for, I
believe, 13 of those 23 and the small site or blog test for 15 of those 23. So if you do not want to know
about all 23 possible pluses or minuses to the speed of your site, then choose V1 or this one. Or you can
click on Edit and create your own custom set. Now this is one of the other items that do not work as
good as the Chrome browser does with YSlow because you can click on New Set, create whatever test
items you want to have on your new set, click on Save Ruleset As. Give it a name. Click on Save. Click on
Save. Click on New Set. And we’re good to go.
By the way, you can see it showing up right here. You can go ahead and run the test right now. But as
soon as you click on Close and then go to open it up again, it’s gone. It doesn’t actually save it. That’s
another problem or a bug with the Firefox version of YSlow versus the Chrome version of YSlow. Let’s
come on back here and do this test. And again, this is Firefox. And for the V2, for all 23 rulesets, I’ve got
an overall performance score of 77, and it tells me what I excel at, what I fail at, and those in between.
And if you click on these, it will give you an explanation over here to the right of what needs to be fixed
and how to go about fixing it. Now if you do the same thing… Go ahead and close this out. By the way,
you’ve got a help section over here that if you click on that, you’ve got your YSlow Help, FAQs, blog, and
a forum, and some issues that you might want to be aware of. Or maybe you want to report an issue
that you just found out about on this particular instance of YSlow.
But let’s do the same thing over on Chrome. And I’ve already got it installed on Chrome. So let’s come to
the website, the exact same website. Click on YSlow. Get this little blow out here instead of the iframe
setup like with Firefox. But at least this one works completely. Now you get the same tabs up here. Click
on Run Test. And again, I’m in V2 for this test as well. And the other one was 77 on Firefox. Here I get a
78. So there’s a little bit of a difference here. And just like with Firefox, you can click on these links here,
and it’ll give you a rundown here of what is wrong, what can be done to improve that score, and so on.
Now the Chrome version does allow you to save these rulesets and display it for future reference. So if
you click on Edit, come over to New Set, and make your own new set. And you might decide to do a
custom set if you have a website that is heavy in CSS or heavy in images or some other item that you
want to test for, and you’re not overly concerned with some of these other rulesets. So you make your
custom set. Choose the items you want to test for on that particular site. Click on Save Ruleset as. I
would give it that site name. Click on Save. Click on Save. Click on New Set, and we’re solid. Now if you
come on up here and click on the drop-down, you can see that it’s right there. Go ahead and run a test.
And based on the items that I checked, this is the overall score. Now if you close this out and then open
this up again – get this big old blow out here – you can see that that ruleset is still intact. It’s still part of
our default settings. Whereas the same thing on Firefox, it automatically wipes out that custom set that
you created as soon as you close it out.
And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on the YSlow site speed testing tool. Thanks for
watching and you have a great day.