20 New Rules for Faster Web Pages

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.

Comments

[Sambo]

Great points, I hope i will see description of any point.

[Acne Treatment]

Excellent post, thanks. I believe that the only point I would have issue with as a professional marketer is breaking up of content to various domains. Sometimes this simply is not feasible for logistical reasons and branding. Also, ranking a domain ensures that much of the inner related content on that same domain also ranks for those topics. Moving content to other domains means twice the effort in terms of marketing resources.