First thing's first:

Download YSlow for Firebug if you haven't already, then skim over Yahoo!'s article about the thirteen best practices for speeding up your website:

1. Minimize HTTP Requests - (Don't make me download a lot of crap.)
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (Have someone else serve your shit.)
3. Add an Expires or Cache-Control Header (Stale bread is best for french toast. Really.)
4. GZip Components (Zip it up!)
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top (I need to see your site before I click on stuff, dumbass.)
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom (See above.)
7. Avoid CSS Expressions (Who uses them anyway?)
8. Make Javascript and CSS External (Duh.)
9. Reduce DNS Lookups (Don't be a social media slut.)
10. Minify Javascript and CSS (Nobody wants to see your whitespace.)
11. Avoid Redirects (I came to your site, not theirs.)
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts (Duh.)
13. Configure ETags (Yeah, I didn't know what these were either.)

I also recommend setting up WP Super Cache after all is said and done. So here we go:

• The Unavoidables: Don't Make Me Download a Lot of Crap; or, Sometimes You Just Deserve an F From YSlow, You Shameless Self-Promoter
• Three Sexy Performance Rules for .htaccess on WordPress: Configure ETags, Gzip Compression, and Expires Headers
• Nobody Wants to See Your Whitespace: Minify CSS and Javascript using Yahoo!’s UI Compressor

* Full disclosure: Where do I stand? My front page gets a big fat B (88%) for making you download a lot of crap:

YSlow Score: DQuinn.net Home Page

YSlow gleefully reports that 32 CSS background images is downright sinful.

Now, would-be ultra-"l33t" programmers might enjoy using a command line, but I sure don't. It's a waste of the time Darwinian evolution spent on developing my eyeballs. Instead, swing on by to this cool guy's website, http://refresh-sf.com/yui/, where you can just copy paste your CSS or JS into a text field and get it minified/obfuscated without fiddling with Stone Age command prompts.

What happens when we have to make changes to our files after they've been minified/obfuscated? Since I don't use a fancy development environment to handle my files, I just minify/obfuscate the files that are up on the server and leave my local files alone. If I need to make a quick CSS change, I make them locally and just find/replace the same lines on the server. Janky? Yes. Not ideal? Sure. But it works.

* Keep one thing in mind when you minify/obfuscate: comments get stripped out entirely, and usually the software license or developer credit for freeware is contained in those comments. After some meditation on this matter, I decided that it's silly to keep the comments in after minification; that would be doing it half-assed and ultimately it defeats the purpose. As a compromise, we should have a page in our website that credits the creator of source code we borrow from the open source community. This provides even more visibility for our open source colleagues while allowing us to fully minify our files.