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

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 it. If…

What is product-url anyway?

I keep having to field questions about the product-url field, and since it came up yesterday, I figured I'd try to clear up all the confusion about it.

So the name product-url suggests that whatever you type in there will become the URL of that product. Unfortunately, this is not the case, or rather, not in the intuitive way. The URL you enter there will be used as the URL for that product in Yahoo Shopping, on the built-in search results page, and on the shopping cart page, however, the URL you type in there DOES NOT actually change the physical URL of the page.
What is the URL of a page in a Yahoo Store? In any Yahoo Store built in the store editor, the URL of a page is the store's domain name and the page ID + .html. For example, in my store at www.ytimes.info, I have a page whose id is rtml101, thehrefore, the URL of that page is http://www.ytimes.info/rtml101.html.
Why would you want to change the URL? For SEO reasons, it is believed to be better to have a URL that includ…

Bookmarklets for Yahoo Store

I was introduced to "bookmarklets" by my friend, Rob Snell, many years ago at one of the Yahoo Store conferences and they are indispensable tools in my daily work on Yahoo stores.
What are "bookmarklets"? As the name suggests, bookmarklets are kind of like bookmarks in your browser, except instead of leading to a web page, they execute a small piece of JavaScript code on the current page. This is made possible by the browser's support of the "javascript:" prefix. When you point your browser to a URL, the browser figures out what to do with it: bring up a web page if the address starts with http:// or https://, connect to an ftp site if the address starts with ftp://, or in the case of javascript:, interpret and execute the JavaScript code following the colon.
Typically, bookmarklets are saved either in your Favorites folder or if you use them on a daily basis like I do, in your browser's bookmarks toolbar. In essence, bookmarklets are sort of like…

Search This Blog