Exceptional Performance
Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team evangelizes best practices for improving web performance. They conduct research, build tools, write articles and blogs, and speak at conferences. Their best practices center around the rules for high performance web sites.
Rules for High Performance Web Sites
The Exceptional Performance team has identified 13 rules for making web pages fast. Each rule is discussed in the Developer Network Blog articles listed below.
1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to 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