With optimization, we mean optimization for performance from the perspective of the user of your web application. Performance should be looked at last as we said earlier in this chapter. This is because optimizations in an application are always needed in a different area than where you thought they would be needed at the start of your development process. Looking at performance as the last activity of course does not mean that you should do stupid things during development, such as including long database queries in your web application.
You can find a wealth of information on the Web about making your applications faster. However, we base the discussion in the following sections on this site: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/.
This site has a list of 34 points that you should look at when trying to optimize your site, subdivided into seven categories: Content, Server, Cookie, CSS, Javascript, Images, and Mobile. We will look at the first six of these categories...