10 More Rules for Even Faster Websites

Update: How-To Minimize Load Time for Fast User Experiences. Shows how to analyze the bottlenecks preventing websites and blogs from loading quickly and how to resolve them.

80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend, so it makes sense to concentrate efforts there before heroically rewriting the backend. Take a shower before buying a Porsche, if you know what I mean. Steve Souders, author of High Performance Websites and Yslow, has ten more best practices to speed up your website:

Split the initial payload

Load scripts without blocking

Don’t scatter scripts

Split dominant content domains

Make static content cookie-free

Reduce cookie weight

Minify CSS

Optimize images

Use iframes sparingly

To www or not to www

Sadly, according to String Theory, there are only 26.7 rules left, so get them while they're still in our dimension.

Here are slides on the first few rules. Love the speeding dog slide. That's exactly what my dog looks like traveling down the road, head hanging out the window, joyfully battling the wind.

Also see 20 New Rules for Faster Web Pages.

Comments

[farhaj]

http:// is important place there or not.!
-----
http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com">sea plants
http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com/seagrapes.htm">Sea grapes...http://underwaterseaplants.awardspace.com/plantroots.htm">Plant roots

[acne treatment]

Very thorough guidelines - and something every business owner and webmaster should have in their scope. Optimizing images is still, by far the biggest culprit from what we see.

PS - delete the spam above - no room for sea grapes here :)

[alexbob45]

This is relly interesting to read and observe...
I feel your experience here....
I am unable to give any negative comment for this issue...
Thanks for valuable info...
_________
alex45

http://mls.fastrealestate.net">MLS

[Trey]

Great post and definitely a list that every web developer and designer should keep in mind. I agree that image optimization (or the lack thereof) is probably the most important. However, it's tough to force your customers to do that before they upload the 2 meg image that should have been optimized down to 30K.

@Todd - any suggestions for a good tool to minify CSS?

[josh]

You could use html tidy, to clean up your CSS. You can get it at http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#source .
There's also an online service cssoptimiser.com.

Another really good option is to enable server side compression with mod_gzip. Just google it if you're interested, it reduces your file size significantly.

[Trey]

Thanks, josh. I thought HTML Tidy was simply for beautifying or cleaning up code (indentation and such). I didn't know it would minify CSS.

We use mod_gzip today, and that is also key. Big performance gains there.

[Anonymous]

you can use YUICompressor to minify css

[Shane]

Just seen the guy that created these rule,,, he was at sxsw

http://www.shanedj.com">Shane