Playing with Programs

I’ve made good use of firebug to measure and improve performance on a number of websites – . A participant in a course recommended yslow when I mentioned firebug. Yslow is an extension for firebug that gives you a list of recommendations for making your web page load faster. Looks good – I’ll give it a try, even though I’m quite satisfied after the first round of firebug-inspired optimizations (making sure the cache settings of various sites actually work – so that a browser requests most rarely changing items like graphics and stylesheets only once).

Like with the firebug measurements, it does not help you with suggestions on how to make the inside of your website faster (e.g. number of database queries). However, with things like caching, you first reduce the number of page loads, so that you can later focus on the most important ‘inside’ things to improve.