Nora Brown Design

Speeding Up Sites: Optimization Checklist

Yahoo!‘s YSlow plugin gives my blog’s homepage a “D” grade. Not too good! I am going to work to improve that grade, and this post will be my checklist/reference.

Make fewer http requests (current grade: D B)

• Combine/compress 6 external javascript files
• Combine/compress 4 external stylesheets
• Combine 11 css background images.
  Update: I have now combined and smushed 11 images into 5.

Use a Content Delivery Network (current grade: F)

Right now, this seems to me to be something for massive websites and online applications…not a piddly little site like mine.

Add expires headers (current grade: F)

• CSS
• Javascript
• Images

Compress components with gzip (current grade: F)

• CSS
• Javascript
• html

Put CSS at top (current grade: A!)

Avoid CSS expressions (current grade: B)

Not totally positive what a CSS expression is right now. Apparently I have 4 of them in my main_new.css file.

Reduce DNS lookups (current grade: A)

I get an A on this, despite components being on more than 4 domains. I have google-analytics.com, 3 affiliate images on 3 different domains, addthis.com, and of course my own domain.

Minify Javascript and CSS (current grade: D)

• Javascript
• CSS

Avoid URL Redirects (current grade: A)

Avoid duplicate Javascript and CSS (current grade: A)

Configure entity tags (current grade: F)

This is getting pretty esoteric. It’s a little hard to understand what Yahoo! has to say on the matter, but it looks like they recommend simply removing the etags if you’re unable to configure them properly, so I will look in to doing that.

Avoid HTTP 404 errors (current grade: C)

• Eliminate any links to missing resources

Avoid AlphaImageLoader filter (current grade: A)

Do not scale images in html (current grade: A)

Make favicon small and cacheable (current grade: A)

Lots of work to do!