14 Rules For High Performance Web Sites

Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% off response time when users request a page. Even sites that had already been highly optimized were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

Having read these blog posts I'm sure you will appreciate - and if you do, you should certainly pick up a copy of his book: High Performance Web Sites: Rough Cuts Version.

Below are links to the 14 topics Steve has blogged about on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

• The Importance of Front-End Performance
• 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 Stylesheets 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 – Configure ETags

I hope that helps.

Over and Out