I really enjoyed this video entitled “High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages” from the Yahoo! Developer Network. When I talk to other people in the technology field we talk about how we can make the server handle requests as quickly as possible. Steve Souders’ talk points out that the real focus should be on the end user experience rather than server configuration. An optimized page will create less demand on the server.
There were two rules that really got me excited.
- CSS sprites is a brand new topic for me. If cnn.com would use CSS sprites they would remove 40 HTTP requests! I get this number from the fact that they currently load 41 images as background images for CSS objects.
- Use a Content Distribution Network. Mosso’s CloudFiles now uses the Limelight CDN for the price of normal cloud storage. I’ve been using CloudFiles for the last month or so.
More info: Best Practices | YSlow Firebug Plugin