Eat.Sleep.Work.,inc.

We here at WORK have been using an awesome tool released by the Yahoo! developer team called YSlow. It’s a plug-in that requires Firebug and only works on Mozilla Firefox.
This tool runs a performance test that’ll diagnose your website’s performance based on the number of HTTP Requests, Gzipping and making scripts external, and a number of other items that need to be either optimized or fixed. Once your results are generated, your website is given a score from A to F. Just like in school!

From my observation, I’ve noticed the most common items that will most likely fail are the following: (1) Minimizing HTTP Requests, (2) Putting Javascript calls above the </body> tags, (3) Add an Expiries header via htaccess, (4) Gzip components, (5) Put Stylesheets at the top, (6) Configure ETags. The following code can be cut and paste into your .htaccess file and uploaded to your web server.

Header set Cache-Control "public"
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2011 20:00:00 GMT"

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml 

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:

<Files *.css>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>
<Files *.js>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

For more tips on making your website faster, click here for the Yahoo! Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site