14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites

These rules are the key to speeding up your web pages. They’ve been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%.

The key insight behind these best practices is the realization that only 10-20% of the total end-user response time is spent getting the HTML document to the browser. You need to focus on the other 80-90% if you want to make your pages noticeably faster. These rules are the best practices for optimizing the way servers and browsers handle that 80-90% of the user experience.

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make AJAX Cacheable