I’ve been using FireFox side by side with Internet Explorer pretty much since it first came out. With FireFox 3.0, however, I have been given even more reasons to love it and use it more and more. One of the coolest things is the YSlow add-on that you can use to analyze your website performance. It is a tool that comes from the Yahoo developer network, and provides specific actionable steps to make your site load faster. Photography websites can often suffer with this problem more than the average site because of how (we) photographers can load up our pages with photos. While broadband covers a multitude of sins when it comes to laziness or lack of planning in the performance realm, page load times still matter.
I spent some time over the weekend playing around with FireFox 3.0 and the beta version of Firebug and Yslow, and made some changes on my web server to pretty significantly improve the page load times. It’s crazy how fast it loads now, and even my wife can tell a difference. Feel free to check it out at http://www.stevetout.com and post a comment here to let me know what you think.
If you want to give this a try yourself, follow these steps to get YSlow installed on your computer.
- Download and install FireFox 3.0 http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
- Then install firebug 1.2.0b3 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
- Then install 0.9.5b2 of YSlow https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369/
Then run the program by clicking the blue meter in the bottom right corner of Firefox, like this one. 
Then browse to the webpage who’s performance you want to look at and click “performance” in the YSlow interface. You will get a nice little report with a Performance Grade that looks like this.
You will no doubt find a few things that will need to be modified on your web server to see any kind of improvements at all. Chances are you won’t be able to do this yourself, and you will need to contact your web host’s customer service to make the desired changes.
If you don’t like using FireFox, then check out IEWatch (http://www.iewatch.com) for IE. These are way geeky tools for sure. If you don’t dare touch them yourself, email this blog post to your web guy and ask him to make some performance enhancements to your website. Your customers will enjoy the faster loading pages, and so will your bank account! 
