Yahoo! releases website performance best practices

March 22, 2008

1:41 am

Yahoo! releases website performance best practices

Stoyan Stefanov has been working with the Yahoo! engineers to find more best practices, and presented on a new batch:

He covers the existing 14 rules, plus 20 new rules for faster web pages. We’ve categorized the optimizations into: server, content, cookie, JavaScript, CSS, images, and mobile.

Here are the new items, with details on them coming soon:

1. Flush the buffer early	[server]
2. Use GET for AJAX requests	[server]
3. Post-load components	[content]
4. Preload components	[content]
5. Reduce the number of DOM elements	[content]
6. Split components across domains	[content]
7. Minimize the number of iframes	[content]
8. No 404s	[content]
9. Reduce cookie size	[cookie]
10. Use cookie-free domains for components	[cookie]
11. Minimize DOM access	[javascript]
12. Develop smart event handlers	[javascript]
13. Choose <link> over @import	[css]
14. Avoid filters	[css]
15. Optimize images	[images]
16. Optimize CSS sprites	[images]
17. Don’t scale images in HTML	[images]
18. Make favicon.ico small and cacheable	[images]
19. Keep components under 25K	[mobile]
20. Pack components into a multipart document	[mobile]