What are you doing to improve your website's performance?
October 15, 2007 at 7:47 AM
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Yahooligans Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville recently launched the supporting site for their forthcoming Apress book, High Performance Web Site Techniques, together with the first of several tools that they plan to release over the coming months: a CSS Sprite Generator.
Yahoo! as a whole have been rather interested in the question of site performance of late, a process which has given us the YSlow Firebug plugin, which “…analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites”. These rules, which veer from straightforward advice (“Make fewer HTTP requests”) to unfamiliar terms (“Use a CDN and configure ETags” – whuh?), will speed up your site or application and (presumably) reduce your bandwidth bills.
So, informal survey time – how concerned are you about your site’s performance? And what are you doing to improve it? Comments are open!
Comments
The work Yahoo! has done is nothing short of spectacular. I’ve managed to implement every rule, except the CDN one, even on the smallest of projects. The difference in performance is so remarkable, that I would recommend the rules be followed on every site you work with.
I did a recent presentation to DevGroup NW in Portland on this topic. The presentation files and resources are archived here:
http://userfirstweb.com/70/speed-matters-presentation-files-and-resources/
The Yahoo information is very useful as is the book from Andy King and the information he publishes on his site.
