Strategy

20 New Rules for Faster Web Pages

Todd Hoff

— 1 min read

Update: Nice explanation in The importance of bandwidth versus latency of how long latencies cause cascading delays in resource loading. Doloto tries to optimize how resources are loaded.

Twenty new rules have been added to the original 14 rules for sizzling web performance. Part of scalability is worrying about performance too. The front-end is where 80-90% of end-user response time is spent and following these best practices improved the performance of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. The rules are divided into server, content, cookie, JavaScript, CSS, images, and mobile categories. The new rules are:

  • Flush the buffer early [server]
  • Use GET for AJAX requests [server]
  • Post-load components [content]
  • Preload components [content]
  • Reduce the number of DOM elements [content]
  • Split components across domains [content]
  • Minimize the number of iframes [content]
  • No 404s [content]
  • Reduce cookie size [cookie]
  • Use cookie-free domains for components [cookie]
  • Minimize DOM access [javascript]
  • Develop smart event handlers [javascript]
  • Choose <link> over @import [css]
  • Avoid filters [css]
  • Optimize images [images]
  • Optimize CSS sprites [images]
  • Don't scale images in HTML [images]
  • Make favicon.ico small and cacheable [images]
  • Keep components under 25K [mobile]
  • Pack components into a multipart document [mobile]

    Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.

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