Do I have to download yslow?

Question

Is there no webpage where I just can input my URL and get something like yslow values? It seems it should be easier than having to download the plugin for my browser. I usually don't program with firebug / yslow and I think it should be possible to perform a test like yslow by form submission. Thanks for replying

Answer 1

Any such service is likely to be overloaded pretty quickly, subject to rampant abuse, and not overly profitable.

A major point is that such a service would be in a high speed data center somewhere and so produce pretty useless results. You want performance sampling at typical user endpoints, and it needs to be in a web browser. Why duplicate a browser as a web service when you are sitting in front of one.

Note Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools attempt to perform some website performance metrics.

• http://www.google.com/analytics/
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Answer 2

http://tools.pingdom.com/ will give you some information on how long resources in the page take to load, and the page weight, but tools like YSlow and PageSpeed are a lot more informative.

If you do not want to install Firebug and plugins, abiding by as many of the YSlow Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site as you can, will put you in good stead, prior to requiring any tools for fine tuning.