It's probably better for most sites to minimize the number of DOM lookups by combining jQuery with the rest of your vendor code in a vendors.js (or similar) fil

It's probably better for most sites to minimize the number of DOM lookups by combining jQuery with the rest of your vendor code in a vendors.js (or similar) file. The chance for a cache hit is very low (and getting lower with the trend away from jQuery). That said, test the 2 approaches and see which works better for your site.