The second recommendation yahoo makes is to use a CDN – or Content Delivery Network. The idea of a CDN is to take the uploaded files, and distribute them to servers around the world, so when a file is requested it is served from the nearest/lowest latency server. The secondary benefit is that this also offloads some of the processing power from your server, to an entire network of servers – whose whole purpose is to serve your files as quickly as possible.
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According to YSlow, I received an F for the number of http requests made by my homepage. This page currently has 23 http requests, including 12 javascript files and 5 css files. This is way too many, and we need to bring this number down. Here is a link to what Yahoo has to say about reducing HTTP requests. I’ll list my updates in the same order.
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As I was redesigning this site, and preparing to redirect my domain to it – I decided that I would hold off on performing the optimization that is important to every website. Instead, I thought I would create a series of posts about the process – step by step so we can all witness how the site improves which each optimization performed. I’m going to try to go in the order presented by Yahoo and their YSlow firefox plugin, in order to present actual numbers related to the changes.

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