High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
September 28, 2007 – 8:51 amBook Description
Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% 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
- Move Stylesheets at the Top
- Move Scripts to 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 their 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
2 Responses to “High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers”
If your page designers (or “front-end engineers” or web developers or UI developers or whatever they’re called at your company) are not designing for performance, there might be nothing better to improve the performance (and capacity) of your site than to have them follow the 14 “rules” presented in this book.
If you ask me, it should be essential reading for a performance engineer as there are many (often overlooked) areas that can negatively impact performance and can be easily identified by the performance test engineer. Furthermore, some of these things won’t even be looked at by a developer. For example, are your developers making sure the “Expires” HTTP header is being set properly?
Making web pages more efficient will not only make them faster to load, but it will put less load on your servers, increasing capacity and saving money.
Here’s the book review on Slashdot.
If you don’t want to buy the book, you can get a lot of the same material in the Performance area on Yahoo’s Developer Network site.
By Charlie on Nov 16, 2007
Charlie,
Hi, this is a great book. I cite it in my new book titled Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, also from O’Reilly.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/secrets/
By Andy King on Aug 9, 2008