YSlow provides useful information on your site

YSlow is a Firefox add-on from Yahoo Developer Network. It provides a way of analyzing your site and suggests ways you can improve the loading of your site. Now that Google pays more attention to how fast a site loads when ranking the site, it's even more important that you work on this aspect of your site's performance.

YSlow grades web pages based on one of three predefined sets of rules (or a user-defined set of rules). It will offer some suggestions for how to improve your page's performance, summarize the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint. 

Once you have installed the add-on into Firefox and re-started your browser, you will see the YSlow icon at the foot of your browser window. When you click on this you will see the following:

 

After choosing the option to run either the latest version, a previous version, or one that takes account of your site being a small one (or blog) you then click the 'Run Test' button. After a short while, the add-on generates a report:

You will see that the page is given a grade (in this case its B - not bad) and an overall performance score (this page scored 82 out of 100).

In addition, you will see that there are various scores for each area of interest and tips on how to improve the performance of your page. you will see that some areas were graded A, whilst some were as low as F. Your overall score takes each individual score into account and if you want to improve your page's score then the first place to look at is your lowest scoring ones, i.e. where you scored F (or E if no F's).

So, you can see that YSlow is a useful too to check problem areas with your site. It's also interesting to check other web pages and compare their performance to yours. You will be surprised how poorly some sites do. Even Yahoo's own page about YSlow only scored a B (and 87%) when I tested it!

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Useful tools for your website

Most businesses have a web-site and so it's important to know that your web-site is working properly. After all, if there is a problem with your site's potential visitors won't be able to find it and so can't become customers and your business will suffer. The problem is that it's difficult to know if your  site is working properly just by typing it's url into a browser. It may come as a surprise to many but you might be able to see your site but it may be invisible to others in other countries. Reasons for this can be varied and it's quite a technical issue. However, you don't need to be a geek to know how your site is working, just the right tools. The good news is that there are lots of them available, for free.

My current favourite is http://internetsupervision.com/ where you can check to see if you site is available around the world. It's a handy way of checking if your site is available form seers around the world. Not only that, it will tell you have quickly your site loads, important when Google ranks sites partly on the speed at which they load.

The basic service is free and you can check your site numerous times manually. They also offer a fee service that includes the following:

• One HTTP monitored service (HTTPS not included)

• Loading headers only (no content)

• First 90 days: Checking every 15 minutes

• After 90 days: Checking every 24 hours

• Email notifications

• Fully upgradeable to any of the paid plans

Requirements:

1. Link to InternetSupervision from your website [get code]
2. Respond to one brief web-related survey per year.

Paid packages range from $2.95 per month to $24.50 per month, so there is something for everyone, whether you have one site or several.

There are plenty of other free services too on the web so you could always do a Google search for "web-site monitoring" or "network tools". Whichever tool(s) you use, it's important to check your site on a regular basis. Arguably, if your business depends on your site then you should sign up for an automatic service that will email you or send you an SMS so you can sort out any problems quickly.

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