YSlow – Eating our own dog food…
We’ve been working on improving our YSlow ranking on ZoomIn Homepage. We scored 83 during the homepage audit 3 weeks ago, now we’ve managed to get it to 86.
To improve our YSlow ranking we been focusing on two things. First, we’ve been minifying our javascript & css. Second we’ve been improving our caching of javascript & css. (Which weren’t caching properly due to versioning problems)
From our optimisations, we’ve managed to shave an additional 9K from our javascript and css. It seems that our optimisation of whitespace etc wasn’t quite upto scratch! We’ve started using the excellent yui compressor to help with the optimisation of the files. We’ve also adopted a more formal asset control of our javascript / css using the rails plugin asset packager. It’s a great plugin to properly manage versions of our javascript etc. Now we can increase the Expiry tags for our CSS and Javascript way out, to maximise the cachability of our pages.
The next stage of our optimisation is to tune the number of images via the introduction of CSS sprites.