During a long car trip to Buffalo, NY I decided to enrich myself by watching a few videos having to do with the field of web design. Here are my notes on Jason Weber’s presentation on High-Performance Best Practices for Web Sites. Below are his “20″ best practices for performance:
NETWORKING
- Compress files downloads.
Utilize gzip encoding when making http requests and responding to those requests. Don’t do it on images! They’re already compressed. - Provide cache-able content.
Set an expiration date on your responses so the server doesn’t have to pull it down again. - Use conditional requests.
Only pull content if it was last modified since a certain date. Include the modification date in the response. - Minify your Javascript.
Removes extra spaces and returns, replaces variables with single characters, can make your Javascript be 25% of its original size. - Do not scale images.
Requires less CPU time for the browser to display the image. Sending more data than what is needed slows down the download process. - Use image sprites!
Keeps network requests down.
Last night I went to my first 
