Yesterday we had another one of our programming sessions that I was talking about in my last post. The subject for the day was front end performance and what we can do to make our sites faster. The meeting was based on Steve Souders book High Performance Websites. He is the developer behind YSlow, a must have plugin for firebug when you are optimizing your front end.

Only about 5 - 15% of the load time from a common website is from the actual server side rendering. The rest of the time is spent downloading scripts, stylesheets, images etc. So, the question is, why do we spend so much time trying to fix our "slow" sql queries? Isn't there a way we can work on our front end so that the client doesn't have to spend that much time downloading all our resources? Well, of course there is. Steve Souders have developed 14 rules that will make your site load faster if you follow them. I will not go through them now, but you can see the whole list here.

I think this is a very interesting subject and there is so much more we can do to make our site faster, and a lot isn't hard at all. It can be as easy as changing a setting in your webserver. I have written about this before, and I think its very important. You do not only help then client to render your site faster, you are also taking a lot of the load away from your servers when they have to serve less and smaller files. I would like to recommend this page. There you have a number of great videos from the yahoo team that are very helpful.