YSlow: Use cookie-free domains More Recommendations

Rule Summary

Cookie
Low
Moderate
43%

Overview

Serve static content from a different domain to avoid unnecessary cookie traffic.

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Details from Yahoo!

When the browser requests a static image and sends cookies with the request, the server ignores the cookies. These cookies are unnecessary network traffic.

recommends:

To work around this problem, make sure that static components are requested with cookie-free requests by creating a subdomain and hosting them there.

If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies.

In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free.

Yahoo! uses yimg.com, YouTube uses ytimg.com, Amazon uses images-amazon.com and so on.

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