httpwebwitch - 8:24 pm on Nov 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

ditto wheel. Speed is achieved by using lean markup, optimized graphics, compression... and having a rocking good hosting plan on a fast server.

I've been accused of having very fast-loading sites. Here are my tips:

If you are doing complex data manipulation at runtime, stop it. Precompute and denormalize your data.
Benchmark.
Simplify your code.
Look for places where redundant or repetitive file I/O or SQL commands are happening. Kill them.
Using an external 3rd party API to get content for the page? Don't. Find another way.
Apply caching liberally.
If you have to, remove features.
If you can't remove a slow-loading feature, pull it out of the initial page response and load it asynchronously with AJAX.