High Performance Web Sites blog

In my first book, High Performance Web Sites, I presented 14 rules for making web pages faster. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news first: there are more than 14 things you have to do to speed up your pages. The good news is I’ve started another book that describes more best practices for web performance. The working title is High Performance Web Sites, Part 2. Here’s the set of rules I have so far:

1. Split the initial payload
2. Load scripts without blocking
3. Don’t scatter scripts
4. Split dominant content domains
5. Make static content cookie-free
6. Reduce cookie weight
7. Minify CSS
8. Optimize images
9. Use iframes sparingly
10. To www or not to www

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At Web 2.0 Expo today I announce the release of Cuzillion. The tag line is ‘cuz there are zillion pages to check. It’s indispensable for people like me who are always pushing browsers to their limit trying to figure out how to squeeze out a little more performance.

I’m constantly thinking of or being asked about how browsers handle different sets of resources loaded in various ways. Before I would open an editor and build some test pages. Firing up a packet sniffer I would load these pages in different browsers to diagnose what was going on. I was starting my research on advanced techniques for loading scripts without blocking and realized the number of test pages needed to cover all the permutations was in the hundreds. That was the birth of Cuzillion. Continue Reading »

This Thursday, April 24, at 10am PDT I’m doing a webcast entitled “Even Faster Web Sites”. This is a new type of event for O’Reilly and I’m excited to try it out. I’ll do 30 minutes of talking with online slides and demos, followed by questions from listeners. There is a limit to the number of people who can attend, so please register in advance.