How To Speed Up Your Web Site

In a recent book published by O'Reilly called High Performance Web Sites, author Steve Sounders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, outlines tips, tricks and best practices to increase the speed of your web site. He outlines 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% off response time when users request a page. According to the author even highly optimized pages, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

The book explains how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. The book focuses heavily on the display time taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser as opposed to focusing on tuning web servers, databases, and hardware.

Here are some of the tips and tricks;

* Make Fewer HTTP Requests

* Use a Content Delivery Network

* Add an Expires Header

* Gzip Components

* Put Stylesheets at the Top

* Put Scripts at the Bottom

* Avoid CSS Expressions

* Make JavaScript and CSS External

* Reduce DNS Lookups

* Minify JavaScript

* Avoid Redirects

* Remove Duplicates Scripts

* Configure ETags

* Make Ajax Cacheable