Site optimisation no longer seems to be an issue what with ever increasing broadband speeds. However Google found that 0.5 second increase in page load times decreased traffic and revenue by 20%. Website optimisation is still one of the most important factors when building and developing sites.

Giants of the internet like Amazon and Yahoo have devoted enormous amounts of time and research into developing and testing fast sites. If your selling on the web 4 seconds for a page load, maximum. Although Google target 0.4 seconds, and are frequently faster. There are many ways to make your site load faster, this article cover the quick wins. Simple fixes that will make the largest difference.

For testing load times the essential tools are, Firebug for firefox and the Safari Developer panel. Another that can prove useful is the YSlow plug-in for Firefox developed by Yahoo. To activate the Safari developer panel, select Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop. For IE8 users you have similar tools, however I’ve not had the pleasure of testing them yet.
The benefits of having a faster site aren't all customer orientated. Optimisation of the site should lead to lower bandwidth usage, and less strain on your web server. In fact the server is the first place to look for improvements. Using either the Firebug plug-in, or Safari developer pane look for "latency" or "awaiting response". These times give you a good indication of server performance on the first document to download. 

If you are on a shared hosting plan, it is worth while talking to your provider. If not try moving, I recently moved to vidahost and improved response times for a site running a ModX Content Management System by 200% simply because the sever were running under a lighter load. If you're experiencing reasonable levels of traffic then it might be worthwhile looking into purchasing a VPS, ask your host for a free trial often they will let you test a new service for a week without charge before committing.

For sites that are serving up content from a content management system, like Wordpress, make sure you have caching turned on or a cache plug-in installed. WP-Cache is the standard plug-in for Wordpress. This creates static snapshots of your dynamic data, reducing the requests to the database. In the screen shot above once WP-Cache was installed the latency fell by approximately 50%.

For sites that host heavy content, such as video or images you need to be aware that distance from your servers will make the content load times more exaggerated. It would be worth considering moving the large files to cloud storage, such as Amazon S3. Amazon invest huge amounts of money to ensure that they have fast page loads round the world, you can be clever and piggy back off their hard work. Use their localised server farms, and dirt cheap storage. To test that this is having a positive affect consider using Mechanical Turk to get download times for the same file, from your server and S3, from various places round the globe. You'll need a few people in each location and downloads at various times of day. As your site grows bandwidth costs can be controlled by moving all your large content to S3. I'll be writing some more on how to make sure content is accessible even when the cloud is unavailable.

The next stage of offloading content is the RSS feeds, move the feeds to Feedburner. This removes the amount of traffic that hits your site from RSS readers looking for new content. Feedburner also provides good statistics and advertising options, although there is a very low click through rate. This will improve server load levels rather than page load times, but it all adds up.

There are quite a few gains that can be made in optimising images. Once very useful tool is smush.it, a service that is provided by Yahoo. Smush.it strips out all the unnecessary information from an image, typically around 5% per image in my experience. In later articles we will be looking at more image optimisation techniques. However these first steps should set you off on the right path.