What Yahoo! has to say about website speed

In the eariler posts we mentioned Google many times to demonstrate to our readers that the most popular search engine in the world pays a lot of attention to website speed and even uses it as a ranking factor. But Google is not the only search engine. Yahoo! is also very popular. What do they have to say on website speed? Are they interested at all?

Yes, they are. A long and highly technical page in their developers’ area proves it. The article is called “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” and contains a lot of tips, which no webmaster can afford to overlook, especially if they are in charge of larger websites.

Of the long list of their tips, “Put Stylesheets at the Top” and “Put Scripts at the Bottom” are probably the easiest to follow. “Avoid CSS Expressions” and “Reduce the Number of DOM Elements” may interfere with some webmasters’ desire to write “cool” code that will impress their colleagues, but then having lousy download speed is undeniably uncool. As usual, the idea is to keep reasonable balance. But the majority of the tips are just very helpful. What we can say for certain is that it takes a lot of expertise to implement most of them. So, if you would like to speed up your website and prefer a holistic approach to things and the best possible results, consider outsourcing this job to experts.