Speeding Up Your Site

Caught up with SEO Revolution’s blog, where Jerry West picked up on a forum post from Webmaster World. Yahoo’s Steve Souders gives fourteen best practices (worth working through this page) to speed up webpages from Yahoo’s research. The findings focus on client-side Web development and making page load times faster to real users. It’s a good list and sums up a lot of key factors well:

  1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
  2. Use a Content Delivery Network
  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 JavaScript and CSS External
  9. Reduce DNS Lookups
  10. Minify JavaScript
  11. Avoid Redirects
  12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
  13. Configure ETags
  14. Make Ajax Cacheable

There are a few other important factors missing from this list that’ll help speed up page load times even more:

  1. Aim to keep all image filesizes below 20kb
  2. Write W3C Valid HTML and CSS code. This negates the need for browsers to use error correction algorithms
  3. Use Server-Side Include (SSI) files as much as possible
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2 March 2008 | Yahoo, usability | Comments

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