teve Souders at the Yahoo! Developer Network has posted an article called Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. It is an excellent article that concentrates on speeding up the front end interface to increase speed.

Many efficiency articles concentrate on tweaking database queries or altering loops but Sounders’ research has shown that the front end is where the most significant speed gains can be made. He lists 14 best practices:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable
• Souders has produced an extension for Firefox called YSlow which integrates with FireBug to give your website a “performance report card” and a list of all the object on the page.

He has compiled his ideas into a book which is also well worth a look at. Some of the ideas here are excellent and they will most certainly be used in WebCards. Take a look and see what ideas you can put into use on your own website.

Please note: the links to the book in this blog post are associate links.