To create a great user experience there is almost nothing more important than speed. According to Steve Souders, an expert in this area, 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end.
Here is the list of best practices he recommends:
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Use a CDN
- Add an Expires header
- Gzip components
- Put stylesheets at the top
- Put scripts at the bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Make JS and CSS external
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify JS
- Avoid redirects
- Remove duplicate scripts
- Configure ETags
- Make AJAX cacheable
Watch this Video of Steve’s talk at the recent Google I/O conference:
Even Faster Web Sites (Google I/O Session Videos and Slides)
2 comments ↓
These are all items that you can check with the YSlow extension for Firebug (a Firefox extension).
That said, I am all for doing anything and everything possible to make a users experience on my site the best I can.
Steve Souders is the YSlow guy. His original talk on the 14 best practicies is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA. This new talk has another list of 10 best practices which he is writing another book on. He focuses on the top 3 in the talk Zach linked to:
- split the initial payload
- load scripts without blocking
- don’t scatter inline scripts
- split dominant domains
- make static content cookie-free
- reduce cookie weight
- minify css
- optimize images
- use iframes sparingly
- to www or not to www
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