Skip to main content

Simple trick to speed up your Yahoo! Store pages

If your store uses images or other files stored in the "Files" library, there is an easy trick to improve the response time of those files - and make your pages load faster.

Typically you reference files from the library using this relative URL:

/lib/yourstoreid/filename

where you replace yourstoreid with the Yahoo account ID of your store. This is generally fine, because the Store is smart enough to expand this to the actual location of the file, which is at

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/filename

What I often see in stores is that the store operator enters things like this:

http://www.yourdomainname.com/lib/yourstoreid/filename

or

http://lib.store.yahoo.com/lib/yourstoreid/filename

What's wrong with that? Well, Yahoo! Store is still smart enough to find the correct file for you, but it doesn't come cheap. What happens is that the Yahoo! Store server does a redirect on these URLs so that they reference the file correctly from the lib.store.yahoo.net server. In a test I've done, these redirects generally took a little over 1,000 milliseconds - or one second. Now imagine if you had 10 or 20 such references in a page? Or inside a css file. It would slow your pages down and completely unnecessarily.

This can be even more pronounced on your checkout pages, where everything is served over an already slower SSL connection (yes, SSL is always slower than regular, unsecure HTTP://), and if you have relative URLs such as /lib/yourstoreid/... in your checkout pages, those will always be redirected. The fix is to use the absolute URL https://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/... in your checkout pages, and http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/yourstoreid/... on the regular store editor pages. Be sure to do this not only in your HTML source but in all JavaScript and CSS files you use as well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to expect when your redesign goes live

At Y-Times we roll out new designs, redesigns and other major upgrades to Yahoo stores on a fairly regular basis. Some of the main questions our clients ask are how to prepare for a roll-out and what to expect in terms of SEO and conversions when the changes go live? For any functional Yahoo store how well the site ranks and how well it converts are probably the two most important metrics. Since pretty much ANY change you make to any page can potentially alter either or both of these metrics, merchants may understandably feel nervous about far reaching alterations to their sites. However, when those functionality and design changes and additions are done right, there is really very little to fear. First off, what does it mean for a design or redesign to be "done right?" From the technical stand point, search engines look at the underlying structure of your site (the HTML, and increasingly also the CSS and JavaScript code) to try to extract information and meaning from i
Post a Comment
Read more

CPR for a Yahoo Store on Google's Supplemental Index

Recently a client of mine came to me and said that most of his store pages disappeared from Google, and he did not do anything to make this happen. I was a bit skeptical, so I went to Google, did a search on his store, and sure enough, there were only two pages indexed, his home page and his site map (ind.html) page. The rest were in the supplemental results, which means that Google thought the rest of the pages were not much different than these two pages. When I looked at the supplemental results, the little excerpts under each link were exactly the same, and I also noticed that what Google showed under each result was actually text from the ALT tags of the header image. I looked at some of these pages in my client's store, and they were actually different. This was a bit puzzling, but then I thought perhaps Google saw that the header and left navigation was the same throughout the site (which is pretty normal), but that the text that made each page different was too far down ins
Post a Comment
Read more

Pre-Season Checkup

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching it's a good idea to do a general checkup on your store to be sure it's ready for prime time. Below are a few things you would want to check, along with a few add-ons that are not too major in scope, but which are often neglected and give you an edge over your competition. Can you Search and Order? Every time we do anything major in a store we test two things: whether searching and adding to cart/ordering works. You can have nice, flashy pictures, cool animation effects, a very quick loading site, anything, but if the store search is broken or you can't add to the cart or can't check out then an ecommerce site is worth nothing. Can you Order? Chances are if your checkout was completely broken you'd know about it by now, but it doesn't have to be totally broken in order to scare away potential customers. So go ahead, go to your site and first do a search and make sure it works. Then, add one or more products
Post a Comment
Read more