I'd suggest absolutely everybody with a web page read up as much as they can about optimizing web page loading. It doesn't matter if you're Posterous or you run your 2,000 daily visitors off a 256 MB VPS which is never under load, optimizing the page can result in 90% decreases in the user-perceptible time it takes to load the page. It doesn't matter if you slave over a hot memcache to save 200 ms off the database queries if your page then takes 7 seconds to render.
Shaving off two seconds, one second, half a second just prints money. Every time I do it I'm flabbergasted by how much it matters.
The HTTP cache control mentioned in the article is one excellent place to start. For the rest, Yahoo pretty much owns this field of research -- any of the presentations from the YSlow folks are worth your time.
I'm kind of a lightbox junkie and I've had some good results recently by the simple expedient of having the browser preload the image (e.g. <img src="foo.jpg" style="display: none;" />) prior to the actual user interaction which calls it to display. There are a billion similar site-specific tricks you can do in Javascript these days.
The presentation I cited in the parent is more motivational and less stuffed with "Here is a checklist of actionable steps that if you implement will make you more money for each one you do."
I'd suggest absolutely everybody with a web page read up as much as they can about optimizing web page loading. It doesn't matter if you're Posterous or you run your 2,000 daily visitors off a 256 MB VPS which is never under load, optimizing the page can result in 90% decreases in the user-perceptible time it takes to load the page. It doesn't matter if you slave over a hot memcache to save 200 ms off the database queries if your page then takes 7 seconds to render.
Shaving off two seconds, one second, half a second just prints money. Every time I do it I'm flabbergasted by how much it matters.
The HTTP cache control mentioned in the article is one excellent place to start. For the rest, Yahoo pretty much owns this field of research -- any of the presentations from the YSlow folks are worth your time.
http://www.slideshare.net/natekoechley/high-performance-web-...
I'm kind of a lightbox junkie and I've had some good results recently by the simple expedient of having the browser preload the image (e.g. <img src="foo.jpg" style="display: none;" />) prior to the actual user interaction which calls it to display. There are a billion similar site-specific tricks you can do in Javascript these days.