My Goal is To Develop Very Fast and Snappy Pure CSS Websites - Any Suggestions?

[Glese]

As you can read my goal in the title, I do want to develop those super snappy websites.

 

There are a few things to consider, the programming languages of choice:

 

HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery, Ajax and PHP 5.

 

I do intend to use all languages the proper way and how it is meant to be, so I achieve the maximum speed, be it proper  HTML tags or no workarounds in CSS, and also bare use of images, or even having no page reloads with the help of Ajax, no matter what, my goal is to squeeze that last bit of second to create very snappy web applications, because those fascinate me the most, simple as that.

 

But there are other things to consider, for example the hardware used.

 

Do you guys have any suggestions regarding a very fast Hosting Service, I am as of now at namecheap.com, I do like their service a lot, it is a great all around service, though I think the speediness in the servers comes only after bigger plans as I assume.

 

And how about the proper use of PHP for speediness, any suggestions regarding that, are there any tweaking books regarding this topic to tweak the last second out of PHP?

 

 

I am open for suggestions and experiences.

 

 

[trq]

There is already a "recommended hosts" thread in this very board.

 

 

[Glese]

I am also interested in which server software is fast when working with PHP, since Apache is not that fast.

[Philip]

Nginx is pretty lightweight compared to apache

[thehippy]

I think some people have a misconception about quick websites.  There are multiple distinct timings that come into play not just how fast the page is generated.  While how fast you can generate the page is important, its just the first step, how fast a client can get all of the page elements and how fast a client's web browser can render the page are just as important.  How fast you can generate a page, is usually the easy part for most programmers, with profiling and caching being the tools to getting that optimized.  Getting the content to the client, for the most part means having your website hosted on a high-availability server, perhaps distributed through a content delivery network.  But also getting the content to the client in the least number of network requests is also important.  Having a page quickly render is where you end up having to do most of the work, using image sprites, optimized and minified javascript, html, cs and perhaps having to create multiple optimized views for each browser.  The list goes on and on and on.

 

A talk just about what goes into making Google's map service responsive.  A very interesting talk.

Another relevant talk from Google I/O

yahoo dev network: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site A fairly extensive list of things you can do.

html5 boilerplate A great starting point following many modern conventions for an optimized page.

Google Articles Directory on ways to improve website speed

ySlow

firebug

xdebug

xhprof

siege

 

I'll stop there, this is a pretty large subject.