Reduce your Javascript. A lot of JS Libraries come packed with heaps of unnecessary code that you probably aren’t using

Design a site to use repeating images and background colours to substitute for heavy image layouts. Note that this doesn’t mean necessarily compromising design quality, only that when you start designing you are already thinking about this.

Another thing to help make it LOOK like your page is loading faster is to move “pretty” javascript to your footer instead of the header, that way your content loads first.

Also, I suggest removing anything that is sitting on somebody elses server. If that server has high load and slow load time, so will yours, and that sucks.

Image optimizing is important, and I highly recommend the Dynamic Drive optimizer that you linked to. I use it all the time.

These are great little tidbits that can be easily implemented. I’ve started doing some of these things lately, especially with the image height and width tags. I’ve got a photography blog and nearly every post has one or more photos in it, so this is pretty important.

Another thing I did recently was change the layout of my div elements. First, I placed each div by absolute positioning within another “entire page” div so they show up and don’t move around as content loads.
The other thing I did was move the content div above (in the code) the sidebar divs. Since I used absolute positioning, it didn’t effect the actual layout. I don’t know if this is good practice or bad practice, but it makes the content load first, then the sidebars. Plus I thought I heard somewhere that search engines like to see the content near the top of the page — but I may be entirely wrong on this. Somebody let me know if this was a dumb move.
 Sometimes you just can’t put all your javascript in your footer (for example when using adsense or things in that line). For those times use the ‘defer’ attribute. If true, it tells the browser to execute the javascript code after the body of the page was interpreted and rendered.
This is probably the best but least used option for speeding up web sites. It increase performance by a factor of 4-5 depending on the site. One needs to be a little care full as older browsers do not support but in general especially if a site is internal turn this on.
Great tips! Another often overlooked (and obvious) point is keeping in mind the amount of content per page. Even if the images are optimized, having 20 entries or more per page can really slow down the load time of your average blog/site. Pagination helps a lot with this.
One thing not mentioned is memory preasure on a webserver. Most servers host 100’s of websites & if yours is not one of the most popular then your code will not be in memory.
A popular method to get around this is to ping your web site. This will keep the site in the servers memory and keep your site responsive. I use a free service called Site Stalke
very good tips. One of my blogs loads very slow because of scripts put into it. I will follow your tips and I hope to speed up my blog.
Also very useful thing is that this tool is able to verify network quality of your server (packet loss level and ping delays)
Thanks so much Daniel, i am have implemented all those steps in my blog except a few. Much appreciated if you could add some more ways.
Great tips indeed. I would add in response to the comment about turning on http compression (to compress the html, javascript and css on the site) that you may or may not have access to this on the server. If you are using shared hosting – as the majority of small sites do, then you are sharing an IP address on a server, and don’t therefore have this option. It’ll either already be on, or you are stuck with it being off. Hope that helps.
Awesome post Daniel…We all knows that the loading time of websites is one of the most important factors ans we can’t ignore it…Thanks a lot for such nice valuable tips..It will definitely help a lot to come up with better speed..
 always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them.