Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. They focus on the front-end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching.

This google tech talk features these best practices and demonstrate YSlow.

Relevant links:
14 Rules for Exceptional Web Performance: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Check out the book for details: High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers

Comments

Re: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

For more in depth information consider buying High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers by Steve Souders, chief performance @ Yahoo!.

Re: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

In their best practices they state "If you're not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, it's better to just remove the ETag altogether."

I think it would better stated "If you're not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, you should!".

Geekr's statement that Etag disable browser caching isn't true, their miss-use however does.

Todd Hoff's picture

Re: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Wow a video. The site feels so Web 2.0 this morning :-) Steve's book is one of the best. If you've ever wrote a book, organizing massive chunks of technical content is always hard. He kept the book short, organized it clearly around the 14 principles, and every chapter is structured in a simple problem-solution pattern. Brilliantly done. And on top of that he is a very nice guy. That most performance problems could be found and solved on the client side was an unexpected revelation for me.

Re: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Excellent demonstration, i've applied some of these rules to all of my sites and they are so much faster now

Re: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

finally check this video. must say there are a great statistic data. and it gave a lot of things for think about it

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