The Web Developer Checklist: A One-Stop-Shop For Improving The Web

But what about my specific technology?

If the list above wasn't enough to get you to actually go check out the Checklist itself, then I doubt that the next paragraph will persuade you at all. In addition to the enormous list above, the checklist also features several areas specific to certain technologies like ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Rails and more.

Tell me more about the ASP.Net Stuff

The current ASP.NET area features all of the above categories, but this time it provides tools specific to the .NET environment that might not otherwise be available on traditional HTML pages. Visual Studio extensions and .NET components can be found in many of the categories and can range from a spell-checker for Visual Studio to .NET Libraries to Prevent XXS Attacks and more.

This checklist isn't specific to any particular .NET area and can be used with both MVC or WebForms.

But I want to go fast!

In addition to the generic ASP.NET goodies, the checklist has a section strictly dedicated to improving performance. This is a great area to tackle if you want to see those PageSpeed and YSlow numbers climb up and also save a few bytes here and there to cut down on bandwidth usage.

The categories within the Performance Section include:

• Best Practices - Covers setting up Output Caching, setting up compression in IIS, and application tracing and more.
  
  
• Bundling - Covers techniques and tools that can be used to compress, optimize and combine the Javascript and CSS within your applications.
  
  
• Minification - Tools for shrinking down and bundling some of the resources within your application.
  
  
• Performance - Performance Analysis tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Yahoo's YSlow and tips to optimize your site.
  
  
• Expiration - Setting up the appropriate expiration headers within your web.config to ensure that caching works properly.
  
  
• Optimize Responses - Explains setting up mechanisms to only get resources based on certain conditions, such as if they have been modified.
  
  
• Images - Tools to optimize and shrink down the images throughout your site and application and how to implement spritesheets to speed things up.
  
  
• Removing Headers - Discusses removing some of the HTTP Headers that are passed through each of the Requests in your application to futher reduce bandwidth costs.
  
  Following even half of the above suggestions should create some pretty big improvements within the performance of your site that both your users will notice and you will appreciate.

Check It Out

Go visit the Web Developer Checklist today and see what kind of differences it can make within your site. The site is updated fairly regularly with new categories and other improvements and I'm sure that the team is hard at work continuing to only improve upon it.