Optimizations to reduce website loading time

Question

What are some important optimizations that can be made to a website to reduce the loading time?

Answer 1

Here are a few "best practice" things:

• Caching CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.
• Minifying Javascript files.
• gzip content.
• Place links to JavaScript files, JavaScript code, and links to CSS files at the bottom of your page when possible.
• Load only what is necessary.
• For an existing website, before you do any of this determine where your bottlenecks are with tools like Firebug and as someone else mentioned YSlow (I highly recommend this tool).