Kent

Web pages are funny things. They *seem* like they're standalone thingies hiding behind URLs, but they're actually a mess of possibly multiple requests that are rendered independently. It's a wonder they work at all some times. Making them work fast shouldn't be rocket surgery, but with so many slow sites out there, I guess it is. Yahoo has released a tool to help you identify areas that need improvement. The new tool is YSlow. It's a plugin for the incredible Firefox plugin Firebug. Running YSlow on a site gives you reports on the individual objects that make up your Web page, and suggestions for areas of improvement (along with a grade for the page). As the suggestions are based on their "Thirteen simple rules for speeding up your Web sites" and targeted at large sites, not all suggestions are appropriate for all sites. Still, there are some areas that will definitely help, providing low hanging fruit for fixes.

Here's a sample of the output (for this site):

It does look like the Subtext folk have some room to increase perf (or I do as it's open source), but there are some excellent items in the report: Look at the extent to which they're using the browser cache. Of course, it's not like I have enough useful content that all of the items from the site might already be loaded in your cache, but that's not the point (I guess what I'm saying is well done guys).