Thanks for the article – it helps a lot in planning my next steps.

I was looking through the “components” tab of Yslow and notice that a number of images are reported twice, once as a css image and once as an image. According to the developer of the component (a joomla component) this is normal and that the browser will not load this image twice ie a browser is written to load multiple links to the same image only once. If not why does isnt yslow reporting an incorrect overall page download size?

Good point.

The expires header doesn’t make that page load faster, but it may make subsequent pages on your site load faster since unexpired elements won’t be reloaded. The same benefit happens if the visitor comes back to the original page.