There are a few different things you can do to speed up your website. This is referred to as web performance optimization.

• The first thing you should always do when creating your website is ensure that your pictures are not too large for the space they are going in. If you have to resize your images to fit them onto the screen, they are too big. Use a tool like Microsoft Paint to reduce the actual size of the picture. This will significantly reduce loading time.

• Use external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and JavaScript files. Studies have shown that this improves the speed at which the page loads. This is partially due to the fact that these files are cached by the browser and don’t have to be downloaded again.

• Combine external files of the same type to reduce the number of requests sent out. Since a request is sent out for every CSS file, it is important to try to keep this number to a minimum. Combining all external CSS to a single file solves this problem.

• Control how long certain components remain in the computer cache. This can be done with an Expires header. This helps repeat users load the page much faster for content-rich websites.

• Allow compression for transfers over slow connections. This can be done by setting the Content-Encoding to gzip or any other compression method that is supported. Gzip is the most popular and most effective method for compression currently.