Steve Souders

Web performance engineer.

Areas of Expertise:

  • web performance
  • javascript
  • CSS
  • HTML5
  • Ajax
  • browsers
  • HTTP
  • web development
Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with more than 1 million downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference sponsored by O'Reilly. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and he frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!. Prior to Yahoo! Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos.

Even Faster Web Sites Even Faster Web Sites
by Steve Souders
June 2009
Print: $34.99
Ebook: $27.99

High Performance Web Sites High Performance Web Sites
by Steve Souders
September 2007
Print: $29.99
Ebook: $23.99

Recent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts

Steve blogs at:

Six themes from Velocity Europe

October 09 2012

By Steve Souders and John Allspaw More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the … read more

What's on the agenda for Velocity Europe

October 27 2011

Velocity co-chair Steve Souders highlights a number of Velocity Europe speakers and sessions that caught his attention. read more

Velocity 2011 debrief

June 17 2011

This was Velocity's fourth year, and while every year has seen significant growth, the 2011 conference felt like a tremendous step forward in all areas. read more

Velocity grows with more tracks, more topics and ... bath products?

May 25 2011

Over its three-year history, the Velocity Conference has expanded to include mobile performance, "Velocity Culture," and a new line of bath products (that last one might not be the best fit). read more

Velocity and the Bottom Line

July 01 2009

Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins and I serving as co-chairs. Back in November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight "best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company's bottom line."… read more

Recent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts

Webcast: The Best of Fluent: High Performance Snippets
March 28, 2013
Join us for an exclusive presentation by Steve Souders from Fluent Conference 2012. Ads, buttons, widgets - third party content is popular on today's websites. JavaScript provides a great way to mashup content from different sources. Unfortunately...

Webcast: Even Faster Web Sites
April 24, 2008
Under his tenure as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, Steve released YSlow and wrote High Performance Web Sites (at one point the #1 selling computer book on Amazon). Now at Google, Steve is working on a new set of best practices for making web sites even...

Webcast: Velocity 2011: Take-aways, Trends, and Highlights
June 24, 2011
The web performance and operations community will gather for three days at Velocity on June 14-16 in Santa Clara, California. In this webcast following the conference, program chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw will identify and discuss key trends...

Steve Souders

"The author's core ideas are clearly explained; the performance improvements are demonstrated; the book's production is excellent. High Performance Web Sites is highly recommended to all Web developers seriously interested in improving their site visitors' experiences."
--Michael J. Ross, Web Developer, Slashdot.org