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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.


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