Nicole Sullivan and the Exceptional Performance Team at Yahoo used the popular YSlow Firefox/Firebug extension to grade the site performance of the 2008 presidential candidates.

How did they do? Overall, atrociously, all the candidates failed the YSlow exam except Mike Gravel who earned a "D". Page weight was a problem for Barack Obama, whose site weighed in at almost 700Kb. It was even worse for Mitt Romney, whose site weighed a whopping 1,531Kb. I hope he doesn't have supporters trying to make contributions on dial-up modems!

Democrats got better grades in almost all performance subjects tested, in particular response times and page weight. They improved user experience for returning visitors by setting an Expires headers and improving the full cache user experience. This helped propel them to a performance GPA of "C" despite their failing YSlow grade.

Republicans never managed to overcome the deficit and finished the semester with an "F".