YSlow!!

For the past few weeks, I have been receiving quite a lot of complaints from my readers about the load time of the blog. It seemed to be very slow and sometimes it never opened up. So, I have decided to dig into the issue and fix that as soon as possible. YSlow comes to my rescue. It helped me identify the actual cause of the issue. YSlow is a tool from Yahoo which analyzes the websites and gives a report on how to improve the performance of the page. It also provides a set of tools to help us in improving the performance. YSlow can be installed as an add-on to the famous firefox plugin Firebug.


Then
Grade E
Load time - 113 s

Now
Grade B
Load time - 22 s

* Load Time includes asynchronous calls to load visitors location on the map which users need not wait for.

* Grading was done under the similar circumstances.

But, how?

• Removed all the unnecessary widgets
• Compressed all the images used using Smush.
  
• Combined all my custom scripts to a single file. This reduces the number of DNS lookups.
  
• Minified the Javascripts using 'All JS Minified' tool of YSlow
• The major change however is the shift of GeoCoding engine from Google to www.geonames.org (Used for locating the users on map)
  

For all the web developers and admin, YSlow is a must-use tool. Yahoo's rival Google has also launched a product, Page Speed, on the similar lines as recent as June last week. Haven't yet tried my hands on that. Shall update you once I get to play around with that.

Please notify me if you still see an issue with the load time or any other performance issues. Pass on your valuable feedback.

Have a nice week ahead!! :-)

-- Varun