There is a video of his recent talk in a technology conference where he spoke about how web performance is important and also shared his experience on handling these issues, mainly about his experiences in WordPress and how the need for speed is really important.

Matt first talked about how WordPress handles the 404 – aka Not Found page – causes a lot of performance overhead due to the fact that the 404 page generated by WordPress is apparently database driven, unlike other static 404 pages. Matt also talked about how easy for developer to create a WordPress plug-in and how these millions of plug-ins can contribute to the performance issue by introducing redundancies: multiple and identical javascript file inclusions in the HTML header. Therefore WordPress created a new function for plug-in developers as a way to eliminate these redundancies.

He also spoke about how a millisecond can save time of people around the world collectively. He took a real example of his website WordPress.com where millions of bloggers have been using as their blog sites and explained how a small performance efficiency or improvement can indirectly promote a more eco-friendly environment: saving servers processing time thus less power consumption.

Interesting issue he raised is also on his experience when WordPress made a total revamp of its user interface and apparently they faced a lot of issues when viewed on Internet Explorer which I believe most web developers have been having as a painful and frustrating task which we are forced to conform .

He also highlighted a few times on his favourite quote by Joe Clark that reads “We’ve upped our standards, up yours” which was coined at the beginning of the adoption of web standards. Anyway, check the video below for a full coverage of his talk.

In brief, Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed works by performing several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

But that’s not all, the good stuff is its article “Performance Best Practices” which explains in detail all aspects on what needs to be done to improve your site: from network (DNS, server settings) to browser layer (CSS, JavaScript, image, compression) which extends my previous post in greater detail.

However these best practices may not be the complete solutions, in my opinion. If your site deals with dynamic content, there should be programming logic behind the content. This means whoever creates the logic has to utilize the best logic for highest efficiency in terms of computation. And if your site deals with a database, optimizing the queries to the designated database is also required.

Ultimately basic rules for programming are to avoid redundancy and to distribute computation load whenever possible.