Front-end website performance
I read a copy of Steve Souder’s book Higher Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers about two months ago. I had enjoyed the book but had forgotten to blog about it until I heard a podcast last night that was talking about measuring site performance.
Souder’s book is a fairly quick read. He provides a series of rules websites should follow to provide good user response times and then goes into detailed descriptions about the techical nuisances and provides examples of how different choices affect real-world performance. Steve’s rules have been embedded in the YSlow plugin for Firefox which can be ran against a site to get a list of which best practices are used and ends up giving a letter grade for overall site optimization.
You can read a short article that gives a high level overview of some best practices that are mentioned.
Recommendation: If you are a website developer, I think this is a fantastic book to read. If you are short on time, just read the article above and download the YSlow plugin.
Additional notes: KITE is a free website performance tool (Windows only) offered by Keynote that was discussed in the podcast.