Ensuring the static objects from your Web site are cacheable is one of the best things you can do to improve performance.

I stumbled across this site the other day, with a tutorial on caching, and a tool to assess the cacheability of a site. Very nice.

AOL has released an open-source tool for measuring Web page performance called PageTest. It shares some similarities with Yahoo!’s YSlow, but works with Internet Explorer (6 and 7).

You can run PageTest as a browser plug-in, or use a hosted version at webpagetest.org (this is still being built out, so please be patient).

We’ve been using (what has evolved into) PageTest at AOL for years. Give it a try.

What keeps users coming back to your Web site? Compelling content? Fast Performance? Cool site design? The answer is “yes”.

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