Methods for Speeding Up Your Website

YAHOO Developer Network has an excellent article (Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site) that describes 34 ways to improve your website performance. You can also see live examples of 14 of these items at 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites.  The article is especially pertinent to developers who make heavy use of JavaScript+AJAX, HTML, and CSS (as opposed to Flash, for example) in their websites.

Following is a listing for easy reference: Make Fewer HTTP Requests; examples here Use a Content Delivery Network; examples here Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header; examples here Gzip Components; examples here Put Stylesheets at the Top; examples here Put Scripts at the Bottom; examples here Avoid CSS Expressions; examples here Make JavaScript and CSS External; examples here  Reduce DNS Lookups Minify JavaScript and CSS; examples here Avoid Redirects; examples here Remove Duplicate Scripts; examples here Configure ETags Make Ajax Cacheable Flush the Buffer Early Use GET for AJAX Requests Post-load Components Preload Components Reduce the Number of DOM Elements Split Components Across Domains Minimize the Number of iframes No 404s Reduce Cookie Size Use Cookie-free Domains for Components Minimize DOM Access Develop Smart Event Handlers Choose <link> over @import Avoid Filters Optimize Images Optimize CSS Sprites Don't Scale Images in HTML Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable Keep Components under 25K Pack Components into a Multipart Document