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:

1. Minimize HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript and CSS
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable
15. Flush the Buffer Early
16. Use GET for AJAX Requests
17. Post-load Components
18. Preload Components
19. Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
20. Split Components Across Domains
21. Minimize the Number of iframes
22. No 404s
23. Reduce Cookie Size
24. Use Cookie-free Domains for Components
25. Minimize DOM Access
26. Develop Smart Event Handlers
27. Choose over @import
28. Avoid Filters
29. Optimize Images
30. Optimize CSS Sprites
31. Don’t Scale Images in HTML
32. Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable
33. Keep Components under 25K
34. Pack Components into a Multipart Document

Another great article to check out is this one.