How to decrease the page load time in ASP.NET application?

Question

How to decrease the page load time in ASP.NET application? What should be the precautions and specially when we are interacting with databases

e.g.

1. w

Answer 1

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

I'm not suggesting ignore the view state and database caching suggestions in the answers already provided. I'm pointing that for what I've found to be simplier alterations is to go for turning on GZip Compression in IIS, setting expiry headers on static elements to reduce server requests, optimize images using a tool such as smush.it

Run a report of your site using Zoompf for a very detailed report with estimate impact and easy of implementation ratings.