Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

Two tools  from Google and Yahoo you may find helpful with this are Google’s  Page Speed, and Yahoo's YSlow.

There are a number of different settings that you can use with YSlow for different kinds of sites. One setting is aimed at blogs and smaller sites, while the other two, YSlow(V2) and Classic(V1) base the performance speed of pages on a series of speed performance rules described in the YSlow User Guide.

Google’s Page Speed is also based upon what Google calls Web Performance Best Practices

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