Speeding up an ASP.Net Web Site or Application

Turn viewstate off by default, it will be a night and day difference on even the most simple pages.

I wrote a blog post about improving ASP.NET page performance this a couple months back. Here are some quick & easy ways -

• Turn off view state
• Turn off event validation
• Implement HTTP gzip/deflate compression to reduce the response size (number of bytes the server has to send back to the client)
• Try to optimize/minimize your database calls for each request

If you are using Firefox to test your website, you might want to try a nifty Firefox extension from Yahoo! called YSlow.

It analyzes your web pages and provides grades from A-F (A being the Best and F being the worst) for each of the best practices, for high performance websites. It will help you to track down the elements of your website which you could optimize to gain speedups.

UPDATE

Now YSlow extension is compatible with all modern browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and others, read more here.

1. Script Combining in .net 3.5 SP1
2. Best Practices for fast websites
3. HTTP Compression (gzip)
4. Compress JS / CSS (different than http compression, minify javascript)
   1. YUI Compressor
   2. .NET YUI Compressor

My best advice is to check out the YUI content. They have some great articles that talk about things like CSS sprites and have some nice javascript libraries to help reduce the number of requests the browser is making.