As I was working on editing the new theme for my blog, I downloaded the Firebug developer’s toolkit to inspect an HTML element on my screen. After installing Firebug I got a series of other Add-on recommendations, most of which were tools that embedded into the Firebug interface. Once such tool was called YSlow.
According to the Firefox site, “YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.” This includes a report card, graded 0-100 / A-F, rating individual performance factors such as number of HTTP requests, location of JS, whether your JS is minified, ETags, and more.
At my work we have already hired out a service to analyze and rate our sites, and knowing the results I tested YSlow on one of our pages. The results were practically identical, with the same recommendations as the paid service! But its free!
The catch is that Firefox 3 support is still considered beta (although I haven’t run into any issues yet), and you must have Firebug installed first.
You can read more about it at the Yahoo! developer’s network page, which includes screenshots. Give it a try, you may just get one step closer to perfecting the balancing act we developers must burden.
