You may have already heard the latest from Google, but with the new Caffeine update page load speed is now coming to reality.

Here are some great proven ways to reduce your page load time (Most I got from attending the SMX West Conference in Santa Clara!)

1. Go to Google’s code articles area for some real helpful insight.

2. Speed increases conversions! Time on site and page views do reduce bounce rat! Actually Google presented this case study, but if you think of your own behavior, do you hang on a site that takes 10 seconds to load? I know I don’t).

3. Server Side Caching is good!

4. GZip compression – seems an obvious choice.

5. Image compression

6. Externalize as much JS and CSS as makes sense.

7. Using CSS Sprites (Amazon does this) csssprites.org/

8. Use of Squid, very inexpensive, and my favorite because it makes the site IP appear as though it’s “in country” and not in middle-of-nowhere-usa.

Should be a regular part of your developer’s build process!