Building blazing fast Web pages

Everyone loves fast loading pages but building such pages requires care & implementing best practices. Some best practices only provide minor benefits but when put together the performance gain is significant.

Steve Souders, the author of "High Performance Web Sites", who champions the cause of building faster Web pages & thereby a better Web, shares 3 new tricks to speed up loading web pages -

• Specify a Character Set at the very top of your HTML document - Browsers take a performance hit of varying severity when you fail to specify it. A META tag specifying the charset should ideally be the first element inside the HEAD tag.
• Minify HTML
• Minimize HTTP Request Size - If the total size of the request headers exceed one packet (~1500 bytes), a roundtrip is required just to submit the request thereby hurting performance.

These "rules" are now part of Google's YSlow clone, Page Speed 1.6 Beta Firefox plugin

Also see:
What is "domain sharding"
HOW TO improve the front-end performance of a website