Mobile Web Performance Optimizations

This is my summary of an excellent article that I read in Communications of the ACM (written by Nicholas Zakas).

1. Minimize the number of HTTP requests your pages make. There's a good deal of overhead in making a request, so make sure to concatenate files, use image sprites, etc. I also learned from this article that there is an Apache module that can concatenate files dynamically at runtime (it's called mod_concat).

2. Minimize the use of images. CSS3 offers features that will give your web site a look that just a few years ago was not possible to do without images.

3. Avoid redirects - a redirect is basically a new request.

4. Be careful when using CSS3 3d transforms to trigger hardware accelerated graphics. Doing this can suck up memory that is limited on mobile devices. If you do use transforms try to limit them to small sections of the page.