Yslow Performance Grades Alexa Top 10
Yahoo has come out with a new firefox add-on called YSlow. Yslow gives 13 Rules for High Performance Web Sites and analyzes those 13 aspects on your site, giving you a letter grade for each of the rules, and possible ways you can fix the problem to ensure your high trafficked server is performing up to par. The add-on integrates with the firefox firebug add-on, and helps debug possible points of slowdown on a web server. The 13 benchmarks are listed here..
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Use a CDN
- Add an Expires header
- Gzip components
- Put CSS at the top
- Move scripts to the bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Make JS and CSS external
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify JS
- Avoid redirects
- Remove duplicate scripts
- Configure ETags
Alright, so what performance grade does Yslow give most trafficked sites? Lets take a look at Alexa's top ten most visited sites and see how they hold up to YSlow's performance check.
| YSlow Performance Grade on Alexa Top 10 Websites | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site | Grade | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| #1 Yahoo | A (92) | C | A | B | A | B | A | A | n/a | B | A | A | A | A |
| #2 MSN | F (42) | F | F | F | F | B | A | A | n/a | F | A | D | A | F |
| #3 Google | A (99) | A | A | A | A | A | A | A | n/a | A | A | A | A | A |
| #4 Youtube | D (64) | C | F | F | A | A | D | A | n/a | A | A | A | A | F |
| #5 Windows Live | B (85) | A | F | B | B | A | A | A | n/a | A | A | A | A | F |
| #6 MySpace | D (62) | B | F | F | A | B | A | A | n/a | D | C | A | A | F |
| #7 Baidu.com | A (97) | A | B | A | A | A | A | A | n/a | A | A | A | A | C |
| #8 Orkut | B (89) | A | F | A | A | A | A | A | n/a | C | A | A | A | A |
| #9 Wikipedia | D (66) | A | F | F | C | B | A | A | n/a | A | A | A | A | F |
| #10 qq.com | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
Some pretty cool results, what is really surprising is MSN getting a 42 or an equivalent of an F. But what is not surprising is Google clocking in a 99, don't you always hate the kid in class who gets a 100% on everything? Not saying that I hate google, maybe just a bit jealous. Some other low rankers were myspace, no surprise, and wikipedia. Very cool tool by YSlow, I already started to optimize this site, and have configured my site to my get a grade of 88 on some pages, which used to be around 54.
Comments
Amir posted on 09/20/2008 @ 5:29:14 pm
This is amazing, but why so many question marks on the qq.com URL?
sreenath posted on 11/19/2008 @ 8:18:47 am
# Add an Expires header # Gzip components i need these above info ,how to reduce the Grades from F to A in my web page ,the page consists fo css/js files . I need to make the page more faster to load. Please help me in this .We are using Apache2.2 . Please provide the code ,to place in Apache. i found in websites searching by having this "AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript application/javascript" for Gzip and header expire "ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 3 days" .These code doesnt work for me by placing in .htaccess file.