How important is YSlow Score? | Hacker News Reader

How important is YSlow Score?

blog.yottaa.com

23 pointsjrosoff19 comments

My personal pet peeve: blog.yoursite.com with no link to yoursite.com.

Extra bonus points for this one having a name so bad that typing it into a new window while reading the original landed me here instead: http://yotta.com/

As to the service itself, it will be wildly inaccurate for anybody running on Cloudfront or another CDN that allows using CNAMES so that img.yoursite.com is served from the CDN. I'm curious to hear their plans for dealing with that.

yeah we have issued a smack down to the guy who set up our wordpress for not putting links in there. sorry about that. and we do need to buy some of the variations of our domain name. but hey, we're a startup!

regarding the CDN. Totally agree, you can't just assume it's a CDN based on CNAME. we're working on some smarter ways of identifying the CDN you're using based on a few things. we walk the dns resolution tree. so we'll see, for example, that img.yoursite.com is cname'd to xxxxxx.cloudfront.net. we're building a database of known cdn's so we can easily identify what CDN you're on. we also want to let site owners tag their own domains to self-declare which things are cdn's and which are self-hosted. all of these will help to give us better data.

oh and we love feedback, so please tell us if you've got better ways!

When your service collects YSlow data, does it take into account CDNs with custom CNAMEs? YSlow gives me an artificially low score for my sites until I go to Firefox's about:config and add my own CDN CNAMEs to the list of known CDNs.

We do not take into account CDN's with custom CNAMEs at the moment. I responded to a comment above that addresses this. See above.

Nice methodology. What I'd be really interested in seeing is how these numbers impact traffic or conversion rate.

If you use Google Analytics, you can create an account at www.yottaa.com and we'll chart visitor count, bounce rate, and a few other metrics against your websites performance. If your site is new to us, it will take a few days before there's enough data to be interesting.

We have a lot of very cool features planned to extend this as well.

We're also working on putting together some aggregated statistics about these metrics for a future blog post.

Ok, wow, I was speaking more of the aggregate statistics, but both of those sound like great features. We're actually about to take our wholesaler/b2b only electronics site retail/open-to-the-public in the next month or so. I'm going to keep you guys bookmarked. We've never spent any time optimizing our site unless there have been huge bottlenecks. This could be a very useful service for us.

Great looking site, btw.

I gottaa a yottaa score of 63 for a site - YSlow plug-in for FF3 gives me 98 using the blog config and 89 using the regular V2 config (brought down by not having Facebook listed as a CDN).

Edit: hang on it's going up and down a bit, it's at 65 now (giving YSlow score of 83) didn't realise it was going to be dynamically updated. Actually looks like a good site speed summary.

Oo, it's up to 92 now, top 3% of sites. Colour me proud.

They way the system work is that it will collect all the data in the order it arrives. Today we had a bunch of people enter new URLs so some of the requests for data were queued up. We were also experience some latency in getting the data back into the database for a couple reasons (badly timed database backups...)

Sorry for the inconvenience in getting your score promptly. On a good note 92 is a really great score. Our score incorporates the following items:

- Time it takes to download the HTML - Time it takes to display the title - Time it takes to paint the page - Time to Interactivity - YSlow! score

We take all these measurements from different locations so if you get a 92; it means that no matter where in the world you user is - they will have a great initial experience with our site.

I like it, but it took 13 minutes to get a score. I also inadvertently visited yotta.com (misread the domain name).

I got a score of 0 from your site, but YSlow on my browser gave me a 74. Hmmm is the analyzer slow right now?

The score shows as "0" initially until we've collected data from different geographic locations, which may take a little while Sometimes users mistake this "0" as the final score and didn't know they should wait until the score gets updated. We are aware of this issue and will fix this in future releases.

I just ran a website I administer and I've been waiting for a few minutes for results. How long should it take? When I hover over the rolling progress bar icons, a tooltip reads "Coming soon..." and I don't know if that means my results are coming soon or the feature is coming soon.

A few minutes is definitely too long. Should be more like 30 seconds.

Try refreshing the page or searching for the URL again.

What URL were you querying?

Email me if you still have problems (jrosoff AT yottaa.com)

7 minutes and counting for me.

It looks like the site is having issues with load. My first click of the link gave me a giant wall of text, which looked like the result of badly crafted HTML + a dropped CSS request.

Other pages have serious Flash of Unstyled Content issues, as well the "render everything, then collapse everything with jQuery" issue that you never notice in dev, but everybody on the internet sees every page load.

Like several other people here, this website doesn't work for me. Just sits there "forever" with a score of zero. Refreshing the page doesn't help. I suspect it might be in my case because I entered a HTTPS url?

I spoke too soon. It finished finally, and with a score of 97 :D

It took about 10 minutes I reckon to run though.

The average YSlow score for all sites is 69. Wah. Higher than I expected!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com