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:

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put stylesheets at the top
6. Put scripts at the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. 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)