Creative Drifter

Everything seems to be built for speed in today’s world of living and technology, so don’t make your end users wait to view a website. Surfing the web and coming to a page that’s a slow-loader is like flipping through channels on TV and stopping at “The View”, and nobody wants to see that. Here I’ve comprised a list of links to speed up those lagging load times and give the people what they want, faster.

• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site – Yahoo Developer Network. The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.
• Web Performance Best Practices – Google docs outlines Optimize caching, Minimize round trip times, Minimize request size, Minimize payload size, Optimize browser rendering.

• YSlow Plugin for Firebug – YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. Get this, you need it.
• Smush.it – Comes with YSlow, great for optimizing images.
• CSS Sprites – The Mystery of CSS Sprites by Smashing Mag
• Pingdom Tools – Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page
• URL Shortening Services – The Ultimate List
• Google Code – Just do it

Did I miss any? Of course I did, probably hundreds, but this should be a good start to optimizing your site and its content. Putting these best practices together and using them everyday will save you time and hopefully make you more money.