Steps to Improve Front End

1. With reference to my last post that Front End Performance are more important than Back End performance I have finally managed to find a nice descriptive article stating how to exactly achieve it.

The below are some of the common steps taken at Yahoo to improve performance of Yahoo Products.
All the points are covered in this link http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

1. The Importance of Front-End Performance

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable

In addition to these Yahoo also provides developers with their custom FireFox extension which finds out what components of your page are slow and what can be done for improvement.
download Page :
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

Reduce your page load time

Ever wondered why your page loads slowly even when your database queries execute at lightning speed.
Ever wondered why Super sites like Yahoo, AOL, etc load faster than your site.

If you are still wondering than this small article and the link mentioned at the bottom may help you reduce your page load time.

In any optimization effort it's critical to profile current performance to identify where the greatest improvement can be made. It's clear that the place to focus for fast web pages is the front end:

1. There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front end. Making the back-end twice as fast reduces response times by 5-10%, whereas making the front end twice as fast saves 40-45%.
2. Front end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end performance projects.
3. Focusing on front end improvements has proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following the best practices described here.

As web applications evolve to contain more functionality and content, these best practices are expected to have an even bigger impact.

Results Php Benchmark tests:
http://www.php.lt/benchmark/phpbench.php

The above link serves only the programming aspect of PHP.
There is still lot of improvement you can do in JavaScript and DOM.
So keep googling you might end up with what you exactly want.