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So if you want your web site to display more quickly, this really is the book for you! If your site is very slow, you will be able to reap huge benefits using the advice in this book and spending some very few hours of your time. High Performance Web Sites summarizes Souders’ findings in 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page.
Steve Souders, the author of this book, previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.
The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can make changes to achieve increase the speed of your web site. Some of the rules deal with elements that go into the htaccess file of your site, some deal with how elements are loaded (sequence as well as form) on the site. Souders simply has paid a lot of attention to how browsers and servers behave and how they can be tuned to reduce the display time. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of the tuning 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
- Put Stylesheets at the Top
- Put Scripts at 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 and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.
However, be aware that even though most of the rules are easy to implement, following the advice will also in some cases require some difficult choices. Are you willing to use fewer and smaller images in order to achieve more speed? Are you willing to throw out ads that slow your site down? The choices are many, and affect many aspects of the look and feel of any web site.
Steve Souders also provides a special addition to his tips: his example pages offer direct comparisons and means to make your own tests. And the book ends with a very interesting 30-page chapter where he deconstructs 10 of the top Web sites in the U.S. using the rules and tools described in the book. Also quite interesting to note is that most of these sites have later implemented his advice after the book was published! So if the top 10 web sites can learn from Souders, perhaps you and I can too?
Praise for this book:
“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<
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