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