I came across this excellent tool by Yahoo to analyze and improve site performance called YSlow and what more it also tells how to go about fixing the problems ! I tried some of the recommendations on one of our offerings in auto I ndia vertical - CarDekho.com - Get New Car Prices, New Car Photos in India, New Car Dealers in India. I was amazed with the results ! The site performance increased by 3x! One of the most powerful recommendations that helped was to gzip the content at server end and making less http requests. Both of these actually created most of the difference. Over this week we will be putting in all the recommendations and i will update the results again here.

How to install YSlow?
First install Firebug and after you install firebug install YSlow. YSlow works over Firebug so installing firebug first is mandatory. Firebug itself is an awesome tool, i will write about it whenever i get a chance.

Now what does YSlow tool offer to improve site performance ?
YSlow analyzes the site performance and lets you catch the low hanging fruits to improve performance of your site. YSlow will analyze your webpage and give you a grade for the page.



Apart from overall grade it gives you where your grade is less. Try to be an A in all. Expand each point to see why your score is low for that point. Click on the point and it will lead you to Yahoo Developer zone where you will find the way to fix the problem as well and improve site performance.

It also gives you other meaningful data in its Stats view :-


Here you get to see the total size of page for both cases when there was no cache and when there was cache. The first time visitor will download the data when there was no cache at all. Try to keep the page size small - 200k is the max you should go to. Also gives you the cookies information and how much data gets transferred in cookies. Now this cookie data should be minimalistic as this cookie data gets transferred to the server with every single request of your

Using YSlow to improve your site performance is totally recommended !
Next Read -> Free tool to identify broken links on your site