Over at Webmaster World, Tedster, as usual, had a great post on the Best Practices of speeding up your site. I’ve also added my commentary as well.

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at the Top
6. Put Scripts at the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable

I highly recommend you use YSlow, a development tool created by Yahoo! developers. To use it, you first need to install Firebug.

The tool gave me great insight into many areas of web page authoring that I didn’t know about and was able to greatly reduce load time of my sites.