High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers

Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.

The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you’ve already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book’s companion web site. The rules include how to:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicates Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

If you’re building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.

＂If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve’s guidelines, the Web would be a dramatically better place. Between this book and Steve’s YSlow extension, there’s really no excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore.＂

-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla’s DOM Inspector

＂Steve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance.＂

-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with more than 1 million downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference sponsored by O’Reilly. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and he frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.