Designing Web Pages that Load Fast
Load speed of a website is really important. Not only some search engines such as Google give you higher rankings based on the load speed of your website it will also be a major improvement for your website visitors.
The first thing thing one must do is to make sure their the web page in question has a valid syntax. One can easily check the syntax of their website code via the use of the following free services : http://validator.w3.org/ and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ . It would also be helpful to check the web page to make sure there no broken links via a tool such as http://validator.w3.org/checklink/
After making sure web page has a valid syntax optimization of all the images to reduce the load time is an easy way of reducing load time. Many professional design software can provide you with an optimized version of your image. If you don't have access to such a software you can always use a free service such as "Yahoo! Smush it" to provide an optimized version of your images.
If you have access to compression on your server make sure it is turned on.
There are 2 very well known plug-ins for for Firefox Web Browsers that can provide valuable information about how you can further optimize your website. These plug-ins are Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed. These tools will scan your web page upon your demand and show you best practice web design & development techniques to improve the load speed of your website.