I guess the people at Yahoo really do know what they are talking about. The Yahoo Developer Network has this nice page with Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site , a list with 14 rules (not all of which may apply to a website) to get your site to load faster. Usually I prefer maintanability over performance, but one sites I’m currently working on had so poor response times that I needed a significant improvement before the thing goes live.

So far I followed two suggestions from the site: I concatenated the multiple style sheets into one to reduce the number of http requests per site (I also removed comments and unnecessary whitespace) and I moved all javascript to the page bottom. I didn’t run a formal test, but then this wasn’t necessary – the HTML now almost renders immediately, only some of the eye candy that is applied via Javascript lags a little behind.  I wonder if this will get even faster when I try the other rules that are applicable to my site. But I’m already very, very pleased with the results, these two minor changes really made some major difference.