Warming up your web applications and websites is something which we have been doing for quite some time now and will probably be doing for the next couple of years also. This warmup is necessary to ‘spin up’ your services, like the just-in-time compiler, your database context, caches, etc.
It has become increasingly important to have your site secured via some kind of certificate. Even your Google ranking is affected by it.
Including a lot of files in your website can impact the performance of your site. Your browser needs to request all those files from the webserver(s) and download them individually. Luckily this fetching is pretty fast and your browser can do multiple requests at once. However, there is a maximum to the number of requests a browser can make, so if you include 100 external files, will probably be (relatively) slow.
I’ve tested this by creating a new MVC 3 web application, copying the Site.css file 12 times and include all of them in the head-element of the page. Below you can see the FireBug and YSlow reports for this test page.