How to make your blog load faster - PART 1 - Using Firebug and YSlow

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot from my readers that the blog loaded slowly. Personally, I blamed it on me having to make every design look like the work of Picasso - but as I dug deeper, I found many more things that I could have simply changed/removed to make it load faster.

So, this series is made up of my own experiences in doing what I can to have a faster loading blog. Since there’s a lot to tell and explain, I’d break this topic down to parts.

Hunting down the problematic areas with Firebug and YSlow

There’s no point in hitting the nail where it has not need of it right? So, first, we need to identify exactly what is wrong with your pages and what’s slowing them down before fixing them. For this purpose, the coolest method lies in a Firefox add-on called Firebug and it’s extension - named YSlow.

Firebug is widely used by web developers to pick apart web pages and to get into the core of them. You can install the Firebug plugin here.

After that, you will need to install the YSlow extension for Firebug, developed by the Yahoo Developer Network. This will be the exact tool we’ll be playing around today and together, they will tell you exactly why your pages are loading slowly(if they are slow that is) and what to do about it.

After you’ve installed firebug and YSlow, you’re ready to roll!

You will be able to see a YSlow tab appearing on the status bar of your Firefox browser. Simply navigate to your blog, and click the YSlow tab, which will bring-up a small window at the bottom of the screen, and inspect your page components.

After that inspection, it will bring up this summary of a few recommendations that you can do to improve you page loading times, and it will give you a grading with it.

As you can see, I have a performance grade of F(25). Don’t worry - if you’re running a wordpress blog, it’s really hard to get a grading above F, mainly because we bloggers tend to use a lot of tools and elements in our blogs that use CSS an JavaScript extensively. Ajax plugins virtually kill your performance and so does private advertising:) (I’ll explain later)

If you click on the recommendations, you can bring up a new window from the Yahoo! Developer Network giving you advice on how you can improve these troubled areas. Read them I say. But the thing is you would not be able to much about most of them since there are some pretty advanced and ‘premium’ methods recommended there. But, you can always go ahead and do what you can - like putting your JavaScript at the bottom of the theme pages and Moving your CSS a bit upwards. They will give you a few performance boosts depending on how extensively you use them.

If you are an experienced webmaster, you can probably gain a lot more from the recommendations. But, not to worry - in the next posts, we will discuss how you can harness much more performance boosts with simple but effective methods., derived from these recommendations.