Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site by Yahoo!

Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team evangelizes best practices for improving web performance. They conduct research, build tools, write articles and blogs, and speak at conferences. Their best practices center around the rules for high performance web sites.

Rules for High Performance Web Sites

The Exceptional Performance team has identified 13 rules for making web pages fast. Each rule is discussed in the Developer Network Blog articles listed below.

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

Yahoo! has released a a tool called YSlow yesterday. YSlow integrated with the popular analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on Firebug web development tool. This tool has helped improve the performance on over 50 Yahoo! properties by 25-50%.