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

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

Adding custom Yahoo Store fields - Catalog Manager vs. Store Editor

In a non-legacy Yahoo Store, there are two ways to add custom fields: through Catalog Manager under "Manage my Tables" and through the Store Editor, under "Types" (the Store Editor's "Types" are essentially the same as Catalog Manager's "Tables".) Whether you add custom fields from Catalog Manager or from the Store Editor does make a difference as each has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Catalog Manager To me the main advantages of using Catalog Manager to add custom fields are: 1) You can add multiple fields quicker 2) You can later change the field's name and even type 3) You can delete the field if you no longer need it. 4) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are included in the data.csv file if you download your catalog. 5) All the fields that are available in Catalog Manager are also included in the catalog.xml datafeed file, which is used by the comparison shopping engines, for example. (See the Search

Multi-Add and Yahoo Floating Cart Blues

Although the Yahoo! Floating Cart is considered pretty much bug free by Yahoo (you can look at the official open issues list here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/floatingcart/floatingcart-09.html ) , there are some pretty "interesting" issues still, so since I keep running into them, I decided to post them here along with the work-arounds. The following issues all occur with multi-add forms only. 1) If you have your quantity set up as anything other than a simple text box (for example a drop-down SELECT box), the floating cart will not take the quantity value. It will take vwquantity as a customer-selected option. The workaround: use a text box instead. Nothing else works currently. 2) If you have a script that checks if the shopper made a selection from a drop-down (basically, any kind of an "onsubmit" handler), the floating cart will still receive the item, even if you cancel the submit event. The workaround: put the event handler on the click