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

Before attempting any optimizations first you need to be able to profile, get FireBug for Firefox. Then you can run some analysis that will tell you exactly what to do using YSlow. Fundamental things that you should do are listed here.

Answer 2

definitely want to look at caching, as round trips to DB are expensive. also, minify JS