One of the biggest challenges that any small business, blogger, or growing company has to face when they’re taking their presence online, is the issue of “page loading time”. Ultimately, you can have the best, most compelling website in the world, and you still won’t earn the respect and loyalty of your followers unless you can make sure that every page loads as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

According to all the major browser companies on the web today, every website needs to be fast if it wants to rank high, perform well, and ensure that customers are happy. After all, if your pages load slowly, then you instantly increase the risk that your customers will start searching for information elsewhere instead of sticking with you.

The good news is that you don’t just have to guess if you want to find out whether your pages are fast enough to keep customers satisfied. Instead, you can use a range of speed testing tools available on the web today to help you assess and analyze your performance. Today, we’ll be looking at two of the most common options: Google Page Speed, vs Yahoo YSlow.

Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow

Both Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow are solutions designed by competing companies on the web to help developers and website owners to make sure that their pages are running as smoothly and quickly as possible. Basically, what these two tools do, is check the performance of your pages according to a collection of pre-set metrics and measurement standards.

Both Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed are plugins that you can download directly onto your browser. This makes it much simpler to run a speed test whenever you notice that something might have changed on your website, or you begin to see a decrease in visitors or an increase in bounce rate. They work with a range of browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, so you shouldn’t have too much of a problem running either option on your computer.

When it comes to similarities, both Page Speed and YSlow do have a lot in common. After all, their ultimate goal is the same. They both want to help you understand the performance of your pages by benchmarking speeds and analyzing different web components to provide you with a list of things that need to be improved or corrected to boost the performance of your site.

Additionally, you may be interested to learn that both options seem to be based on research that comes from a man called Steve Souders, who originally designed the YSlow plugin when he was working within Yahoo, and now appears to be working on the same things with Google.

The Differences Between Page Speed and YSlow

Because both of these website analysis tools use roughly the same rules to determine whether your pages are performing as quickly and seamlessly as they should be, you’ll find that their underlying function is practically identical. In other words, you can analyze page speed effectively using either Google Page Speed or Yahoo YSlow without many problems. Where these applications differ most, is in their additional functions. For example:

Google Page Speed comes with:

• Far more attention to detail when it comes to CSS. Google Page Speed offers plenty of useful advice when it comes to CSS selectors, and you won’t get that level of guidance anywhere else.
• A Page Speed Activity function that is similar to a load timer evaluation, but it offers graphs in real time, so you can see exactly what’s happening on your website at any given time.
• Automatic Optimization: With the PageSpeed module, you can integrate Google with your Nginx or Apache website server to optimize your site automatically. That quickly simplifies the process of upgrading speed.
• Optimization Library Integration: You can also find the optimizations that exist behind the PageSpeed module in a library that allows you to design and build your own tools.

On the other hand, Yahoo YSlow comes with:

• A gigantic interface that contains plenty of useful visualizations and sorting abilities, as well as a printing option if you want to get your checklist of improvements down on paper
• Customisable profiles that allow you to get readings based on the needs of high-traffic websites, compared to smaller websites.
• Single grade evaluations that tell you how much your site needs to be improved<./li>
• Yahoo YSlow also summarizes all your page components with handy statistics about your pages. Once you’ve got all the data you need, you can use the available tools for performance analysis to immediately fix any problems.

Assessing the Two Plugins

Ultimately, your decision as to which plugin is best for your website will be something that’s made according to personal preferences, background, and unique business needs. It’s worth noting that Yahoo YSlow has been around for much longer than Google Page Speed, and this can mean that a lot of loyal fans consider it to be the best, most advanced option when you want to make sure that you have one of the most competitive sites on the web. However, those who already love and use Google on a daily basis think that Google’s relative newness to the market makes it more up-to-date when it comes to features and additional benefits.

For some people, Google Page Speed will be the obvious choice because it can be used alongside other Google tools that are essential to maintaining the performance of a website, such as Google Analytics. However, if you don’t mind switching to Yahoo for some of your needs, then you might find that YSlow is more developed than its counterpart because the web page analysis it offers is based on 23 testable rules.

If you’re not sure which option to use, the best solution may be to try both plugins for yourself and find out which one you consider to be the most user-friendly, and the most successful when it comes to helping you boost the performance of your website.