Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
Yahoo has this awesome article on speeding up your web pages. Granted, most of this could be plucked out directly from your site using the Yahoo! YSlow Firefox add-on, but I highly recommend you checking it out. Here’s a summary of what they have to offer:
- Minimize HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires or a Cache-Control 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 and CSS
- Avoid Redirects
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Configure ETags
- Make Ajax Cacheable
- Flush the Buffer Early
- Use GET for AJAX Requests
- Post-load Components
- Preload Components
- Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
- Split Components Across Domains
- Minimize the Number of iframes
- No 404s
- Reduce Cookie Size
- Use Cookie-free Domains for Components
- Minimize DOM Access
- Develop Smart Event Handlers
- Choose over @import
- Avoid Filters
- Optimize Images
- Optimize CSS Sprites
- Don’t Scale Images in HTML
- Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable
- Keep Components under 25K
- Pack Components into a Multipart Document
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