Using Page Speed/Yslow to optimize your online store
Everyone wants their site to load faster, however, the speeding elements that can be a tricky thing. These are several tried and real tricks that people use in order to keep the page load time down, however, once you try out the optimization thing, you end up hitting the plateau wherein it has become tough to squeeze more amount of speed of your code.
A majority of web developers rely on tools like Page speed or YSlow tools. If you haven’t used them, make sure you install them right now, these can be found with the add-ons for browsers like Firefox. These are simply designed to help you in increasing the speed of your page load by simply showcasing you the things slowing them down and are seen used in tandem.
These can help you alerting you to some amount of optimizations, which you never tried before:
Understand the Tools – Yslow/Page Speed
First things first, you need to have a fair understanding of the said tools. These are not just tools, which will indicate the speed of your site but these would also tell you the things you can do for optimizing the performance of the same. It will also enlist the cause behind the slow speed of your site thus in many ways these can be your helping hand in many ways. For example if you have a wrong hosting services for your site, the tools would suggest the same. This is the reason why understanding these tools is important.
Know the Basics
For novices, the key to having faster pages is by reducing the front end load time. For the end users, more than 80 percent of the response time is linked to the HTTP requests. This is often termed as a performance golden rule, which simply means that you need to reduce the following requests, here is the way to do things:
- Simplicity: Make the page designs as much simple as possible having one or two images along with text, however, you would require a richer kind of components over your website.
- Combination: Adding up all the scripts and piling them over in one script along with combining all the CSS in one style sheet can do wonders.
Combine Images with CSS Sprites
Combining images over a couple of files like using the CSS sprites can reduce the number of round up tips , overhead and thus reduce the total amount of bytes can make all the difference. If you have a number of images over your page, you are compelling multiple roundtrips of the server in order to secure all your resources, which can hamper the page speed. With the help of sprites combine all the background images over the webpage in one image. The proper image domain can be showcased owing to the CSS background image and background position features. Using CSS sprites can help in reducing the delays caused owing to the roundtrips made over the server like downloading other resources. It also helps in reducing the request overheard and lastly in help in reducing the total number of bytes seen on the downloaded pages.
Using Yslow and Page Speed Effectively
The Yahoo tool can help in giving the summery of the web page’s components, which showcases you the required statistics over the page along with offering you the performance analysis tool including Jslint and Smush.it along with giving you the summary of what you really need to improve for the page performance. Also, you can leverage the chrome extensions that helps in testing up the speed of the page for any site made in PHP or other technology. Similarly, the page speed tool is extremely useful for the web developers to help in improving the performance of the website. Seeking the single drop over a URL inside the text box along with clicking over a button can help in finding the report. The suggestions from these tools can be further broken down into low, medium and high priority.
Wrapping Up
With rich and cool designs found in the website, the page speed is seen getting slower down. Hence every time you get the time to implement the new plug-ins you need to ask yourself, what impact it can have over the speed of your site. Sacrificing the speed of your website is no good deal, it can be found out seeking the help of these tools, which can help in embarking with the required suggestions.