Skip to main content

Really Quick Trick to Improve Page Load Speed of a Yahoo Store a Little Bit

With Google getting more and more aggressive about wanting web sites to be quick to load (particularly on mobile), we often find ourselves trying to find even the smallest of tweaks to nudge up that page speed score even if by a tiny bit. Here is a quick trick you can do completely on your own, without having to ask a developer, that will probably bump up your Google PageSpeed score by a couple of points.

First a short disclaimer: this trick is only applicable if you have enabled the Yahoo! Badge in your Store Manager, under Live Insights & App Gallery.

Before you start, you may want to check your site's Google PageSpeed (the home page is a good place to start) both as a benchmark, and also to get a glimpse at how fast (or slow) Google believes your site (or home page) is. Here is the link:


Ok, so if you did enable the Yahoo! Badge, your site includes a small Yahoo Live Store badge, much like this:


When you hover over the badge, it expands to show some more info, plus, by default, three of your most commonly bought products, with their thumbnails:



It's all good, but the problem is, those little thumbnails hide a secret: they are the original, native product images you uploaded for those products, simply resized in the browser to display in a smaller size. What this means is that if you uploaded large, high resolution images, then those large files are downloaded here is well. This happens in the background, so your site's "responsiveness" (meaning the feeling of how fast the page loads and responds) is not affected, however, Google will look at your overall page load time and will count these potentially huge images as if they were placed right on the page. The ability for us users, to have more control over these images is in Yahoo's road map, but until that happens, my recommendation is for you to turn those images off. And it's very easy to do.

In your Store Manager, click on "Live Insights & Statistics". Then, click the "Badge" tab, and on that tab, uncheck the "Showing Product Images on Badge" checkbox:



Then wait between 10 to 15 minutes for the little thumbnails to disappear from your site's Yahoo! badge. Once they did disappear, run Google PageSpeed Insights on the same page again and check the numbers. Chances are that you will see at least a few ticks of improvement - without having to have done any coding at all.

If your page load speed seems low and want to do more about improving it, contact us or check out our check out our Yahoo! Store Page Load Optimization service.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

How to create clean and efficient CSS

In a typical workday, I deal with dozens of yahoo stores and very often I have to tweak, fix, or change CSS used by these stores. While some stores have very clean and easy to follow style sheets or CSS definitions, the vast majority of stores I've seen seem to include complete hack jobs, style sheets put together completely haphazardly, or as an afterthought. While working in such a store, the idea came to me to turn my gripes into a post. So the following is my list of dos and don'ts of good CSS or style design. 1. Externalize your style sheets. This means to save your style sheets into one or more css files, and link to them using the <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/lib/yourstoreid/yourstyle.css"> notation, or in Editor V3.0, you can use the LINK operator. 2. Combine your style sheets into as few files as possible. Nothing worse than trying to wade through 6, 8, 10 or more different style sheets to find the color of a l

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