This post courtesy of Rich Skrenta:
Steve Souders of Yahoo’s “Exceptional Performance Team” gave an insanely great presentation at Web 2.0 about optimizing website performance by focusing on front end issues. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see it in person but the Web 2.0 talks have just been put up and the ppt is fascinating and absolutely a must-read for anyone involved in web products.
His work has been serialized on the Yahoo user interface blog, and will also be published in an upcoming O’Reilly title (est publish date: Sep 07).
We have so much of this wrong at topix now that it makes me want to cry but you can bet I’ve already emailed this ppt to my eng team.Even if you’re pure mgmt or product marketing you need to be aware of these issues and how they directly affect user experience. We’ve seen a direct correlation between site speed and traffic.
Steve Souders later replied as follows:
Thanks for all the feedback. The Web 2.0 presentation was 3 hours long and we weren’t able to cover all of the slides! There is a lot of information behind the 14 rules. You can read the “Rough Cuts” version of the book chapters online now at O’Reilly (you have to pay). You can get snippets from a series of blogs I’m writing for Yahoo! Developer Network. Also, Tenni Theurer has written a great series of articles about some of our research on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. I’m presenting at OSCon in July. This high level of interest in improving web performance is awesome. I hope to see you at OSCon.
Here is the list as defined by Steve:
- Rule 1 - Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Rule 2 - Use a Content Delivery Network
- Rule 3 - Add an Expires Header
- Rule 4 - Gzip Components
- Rule 5 - Put CSS at the Top
- Rule 6 - Move Scripts to the Bottom
- Rule 7 - Avoid CSS Expressions
- Rule 8 - Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Rule 9 - Reduce DNS Lookups
- Rule 10 - Minify JavaScript
- Rule 11 - Avoid Redirects
- Rule 12 - Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Rule 13 - Turn Off ETags
- Rule 14 - Make AJAX Cacheable and Small