There are a host of reasons why you should care about web performance, but some of them have become more important in the last few years. Besides the potential cost savings of squeezing more performance from the same hardware and the bragging rights of being able to build a fast site, speed has become a compelling part of the user experience, an important factor in search engine treatment of sites, and a must for maintaining or improving conversion rates. Optimizing web performance is challenging because it’s hard to quantify a good user experience, it’s hard to systematize or automate speed optimization, and technology changes–yesterday’s good advice becomes today’s bad advice. Each of these challenges is big enough for its own talk, but this talk will focus on some good advice that has definitely turned…