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

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