Here's a very good web-page performance document for those of us who build web sites. There are a number of common sense rules for limiting images, inloading CSS or JS, and other tips. The trick is balancing these guidelines with Design department constructs and partner integration pressure. Back at Lycos we went through at these 3 company-wide initiatives to tighten up the pages and then as soon as the initiative had finished we'd watch the pages get fatter and fatter over the next months. Frustrating.

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.