While trying to improve DNN performance of my site even more, I came across a FireFox add-in from Yahoo called YSlow. While the add-ins is interesting the web page that it points is is even more interesting.

It lists Yahoo's performace groups Best Practices for Speeding up Your Web Site. Yahoo also has a video with the author.  While several of the suggestions aren't realistic for most of us - like use a "Content Delivery Network", many are easy.

A couple that caught my attention were "minify" js and css. YUIcompressor is a tool from Yahoo that does minification (removing comments and extra white space.)  I tested it on DNN's js and css files that get loaded on every page. The reduction was from 30% on average up to 100% on Portal.css. It sure can't be too much work to append "-orig" to the end of each file name and then run them thru YUIcompress to recreate the original filename. This files are static and down change.

Another one talked about in the video was for how to include css file. "Don't use the "@ construct" and "always use link." this is because browsers wait to render when they see the @.  I haven't verified this but I did remember that you use this construct on dnncreative.com.

Also css files should be included at the top of the file and javascript at the bottom, not that we have much control over th

/Dave