Haven’t made a tech post in a while but I discovered this nifty tool from Yahoo called YSlow that I wanted to share.  It’s a little program that can run tests on any URL in your browser and give it a speed rating based on some pre-set rules.  It will run a speed test on the site and return a final grade based on the performance of Javascript, CSS, images, caching, and other general server configuration.  For each of these sub-categories, it will also give a grade and some advice/links on how to improve performance in that area.

Of course, since YSlow can only test the what it sees from the web server, it won’t be able to help if you’ve got an overloaded database or a maxed out CPU.  Still, a very useful tool for those who want to improve the performance of their blog or personal sites.

Since YSlow is a plugin for Firebug, you will need to have Firefox with Firebug installed to use YSlow.  But since all my readers are smart people, I’m sure you’re already using it (or maybe Opera) ;)