14 Rules for Faster Websites

[mandy]

Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests

Rule 2: Use a Content Delivery Network

Rule 3: Add an Expires Header

Rule 4: Gzip Components

Rule 5: Put CSS at the Top

Rule 6: Move Scripts to the Bottom

Rule 7: Avoid CSS Expressions

Rule 8: Make JavaScript and CSS External

Rule 9: Reduce DNS Lookups

Rule 10: Minify JavaScript

Rule 11: Avoid Redirects

Rule 12: Remove Duplicate Scripts

Rule 13: Turn Off ETags

Rule 14: Make Ajax Cacheable

from the book: http://safari.oreilly.com/9780596529307/...ngineering

related:

Steve Souders is Yahoo!'s Chief Performance Yahoo!. This is one in a series of blogs describing the best practices he's developed at Yahoo! for improving performance. This article is based on Chapter 1, The Importance of Front-End Performance from Steve's forthcoming book High Performance Web Sites, published by O'Reilly.

In 2004, I started the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo!. We're a small team chartered to measure and improve the performance of Yahoo!'s products. Having worked as a back-end engineer most of my career, I approached this as I would a code optimization project - I profiled web performance to identify where there was the greatest opportunity for improvement. Since our goal is to improve the end-user experience, I measured response times in a browser over various bandwidth speeds. What I saw is illustrated in the following chart showing HTTP traffic for http://www.yahoo.com...

full article: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives...rmanc.html