Building high performance websites is very important because it helps in increasing the conversion rate on your website, especially eCommerce websites. There are many statistics on the web which proves that high speed websites retain more users and hence more revenue. You can checkout this nice info-graphic for a quick comparison. Even if you are not able to score a perfect 100 (not even Google.com) on the Google PageSpeed Testing Tool, at least try to stay above the 85% mark.
There is no single-bullet solution to making your site performing at top speed because every application or website is different in terms of it’s user base, data and interactivity on a multitude of devices. There are a lot of automated tools coming up like Google’s PageSpeed Module which will do most of the stuff for you or a plethora of automated build tools to perform optimizations at deploy time.
I myself was learning a lot of performance optimization techniques for my small sites but there isn’t once place where you can find links and tips to all the tools required. So, I thought of creating an exhaustive checklist of front-end performance tips and tricks. I am not a Guru in this field but this is my earnest effort to help other people like me who wants to do more fine grained optimization apart from using the automated tools.
Please visit this page and let me know if you know of any more ideas/tools/tricks which I might’ve missed:
http://lab.abhinayrathore.com/website-performance-optimization-checklist/
BTW, none of my websites will score 100% on Google PageSpeed Testing Tool because I simply don’t case that much optimization in favor of easy maintenance and ease of linking external libraries through CDN :)