Steve Souders of Yahoo’s "Exceptional Performance Team" gave an
insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues.
This is a
big presentation, with a lot of data in it (a whole book’s worth apparently), but half way through he boils it down into 14 rules for faster front end performance:
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Use a CDN
- Add an Expires header
- Gzip components
- Put CSS at the top
- Move JS to the bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Make JS and CSS external
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify JS
- Avoid redirects
- Remove
duplicate scripts
- Turn off ETags
- Make AJAX cacheable and small