Considerations for High Performance Websites

Steve Souders has jolted down fourteen simple tips and tricks to improve website performance.

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
4. Gzip components
5. Put CSS at the top
6. Move JS to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10. Minify JS
11. Avoid redirects
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Turn off ETags
14. Make AJAX cacheable and small

You can download his complete presentation on the said topic at Web 2.0 Expo conference from here

For a detailed description of each of the above 14 tips refer to Exceptional Performance section at Yahoo Developer Network.