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

To reduce network traffic, you can minify static files, such as CSS and Javascript, and use gzip compression on generated content. You can also try using tools such as optipng to reduce the size of images.

However, the first step to take is to actually analyse what's taking all of the time -- whether it's sending the bits over the network, or actually generate the content to send. There's no point making your CSS files 10% smaller if it takes a minute to generate each HTML page.