Improve your website performance

You want to follow this process in order to be in a continues improvement state. Your web pages are going to move and change over time (hopefully, every 1-2 weeks, by the end of your sprint, right?) so It’s essential that you are constantly checking your web server for performance issues. If you have root-like access and can install stuff on the server, check out ab - an Apache web server benchmarking tool or Httperf from IBM. Benchmarking before and after making major changes will also give you some insight on the effects of your changes. If your web server can’t handle the traffic your website generates, it’s time for an upgrade or server migration.
Another good tool that you want under your belt is: Cuzillion
It was created by Steve S. (yep.. the guy that use to be Yahoo! as Chief of Performance and now, like so many others, is working for this little company from Mountain view) that helps you experiment with different configurations of a web page’s structure in order to see what the optimal structure will be.

One of the most trivial steps (that so many developers neglecting) is Minification. This is the process of removing unneeded characters (such as tabs, spaces, source code comments) from the source code to reduce its file size.

And don’t worry - you won’t have to reformat your code manually. There’s a plethora of free tools available at your disposal for minifying your CSS and JavaScript files. For CSS, you can find a bunch of easy-to-use tools like: cssoptimiser and cleanCSS

For JavaScript, some popular minification options are

• JSMIN
• YUI Compressor
  
• JavaScript Code Improver
  

A good minifying application gives you the ability to reverse the minification for when you’re in development. Alternatively, you can use an in-browser tool like Firebug to see the formatted version of your code.