SitePoint has a great article entitled Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps detailing some great ways to improve the performance of your site.

Inspired by Yahoo’s best practices for speeding up your website, the article details some more practical details for the average website as well as greater detail on implementing the changes.

To analyze your sites performance, get Yahoo’s FireFox/FireBug plugin YSlow.

In a nutshell, here are some of the best tips in the article:

1. Decrease file sizes - writing efficient HTML, CSS and Javascript will help to reduce file size, page load times, and often times SEO efforts
2. Optimize external files, such as CSS and Javascript - Combine multiple style sheets or Javascript files into one
3. Compress your HTML, CSS and Javascript - use Apache’s gzip/deflate to server compressed version of your pages to compatible browsers

One of the most critical steps in building a website that is often overlooked is quality assurance. It is critical to make sure that your web pages render properly in different browsers across different platforms. Understanding your target audience can assist you in determining if testing for more obscure platforms and browsers is necessary, but as a general rule of thumb, it is important to test the most commonly used browsers. After the top 5, the usage significantly drops off. According to W3 Counter, these are:

Each browser annoyingly has its own nuances. There are host of services out there to help you test. Smashing Magazine has an excellent write up on these different services. I have used BrowserCam in the past, and it is very good. It lets you pick and choose which platforms and browser versions to test and then captures screen shots for you.

Does anyone have any experience with these other services?