Everyone loves a faster loading website. A website that looks simplistic yet elegant and loads blazing fast has the advantage of better crawling, more pageviews and more repeat visits. Not everyone uses a high speed Internet connection, not every one uses a faster computer that will render the page fast. So, we need to tweak a huge.
Creating a fast website is a specialized branch of web performance and maintenance now and now excellent consultants available for tweaking too.
We are are listing the best practices for making a website load faster:
---
- Minimize HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Add headers with expiration date or Cache-Control
- Gzip Components (Java Scripts and CSS)
- Place the styles (CSS) at the beginning
- Place Java Scripts at bottom
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Avoid Javascript and CSS outsourcing
- Reduce DNS look up time
- Avoid redirects
- Remove duplicate scripts
- Set ETags
- Use Ajax with Cache-Control headers
- Flush the buffer early
- Delay loading certain components
- Reduce the number of DOM elements
- Split components across domains
- Minimize / avoid iframes.
- Do not use 404
- Reduce the size of Cookies
- Avoid CSS Filters
- Optimize images and use Yahoo Smush it
- Optimize style sheets (CSS)
- Do not scale images in HTML
- Use favicon.ico expiration date
- Keep individual components below 25 Kb
- Combine CSS and Java script
- Leverage browser caching
- Cache pages
We will discuss the topics individually in future.

Tools to test Page speed
- Webpagetest
- Firefox plugins : Firebug is the base; install Yslow and Google page
- Google Webmaster tool to follow up
This post has been has been written as per guidelines and best practices mentioned by Yahoo!, Google, Steve Souders.
