How to reduce loading time of a web page

[myndconsulting]

Find a good web host.. a dedicated server is faster than a shared one.
Optimize your images.. lesser colors, GIF/PNG.
Divide a page full of text to multiple pages
(Ex. Google's home page design rather than Yahoo!'s)
Focus on usability... keep your design simple and informative.

[EnhanceSEO]

Make sure everything is in css, reduce your images sizes using firworks and remove as much white space as you can in your coding - also do the same in your css file.

[LazyJim]

another tip is to load CSS up front (in the HEAD of the HTML document) and load JS at the end wherever possible (the web page will stop downloading and rendering while waiting for a javascript to be loaded and processed!).

[gpyong]

I apply these for my own web development :

• Optimize all image in JPG quality less than 70
• Compress all CSS, and javascript using YUI Compressor
• Monitoring time required for MYSQL Query fetching, (probably a bad query may slow done the fetching process thus more time needed to load the page)
• Compress and Optimize the Flash / Animated GIF size

[sfod_d223]

Since I give a stink about the subject, I use a plug-in called WP Super-Cache to cram my site into the pipes of any browser. It's Digg proof as well.

[kokkada]

Reduce php code in web pages and optimise images

[DH - Tristan Perry]

A few things I'd say:

1) Make sure you are with a good host with good bandwidth (i.e. connectivity). This could be a cause of slow loading times.

2) Make sure your website is optimized. Use a webpage size and speed calculator like http://www.cogah.com/index.php/WebsiteSize/ to crawl your site and highlight the file sizes of your images, HTML etc, and optimize based on that.

3) If you use a dynamic script, ensure it uses good coding. The same goes for any mods/add-ons you install for those scripts.

[jamesparker]

You can simply reduce the load time of a web site by reducing the images size or by not using flash or other multimedia items in your website!

[FGTH]

If you're serious about optimizing a site's performance, I suggest taking a holistic approach to include server (tuning, configuring, logging, compiled, interpreted, etc...), network/connectivity (bandwidth, routing, cache, edge, grid, etc...), Web pages (code quality, optimization, etc...), and content (image quality, optimization, etc...).

Simple things like minimizing access and error logging, specifying listener ports and IPs (so your http server only listens to active IP binds and not all including unused ones) can improve a server's performance.

Are you running LAMP, WAMP or WIMP?

[websiteguy]

gzip compression , css , less scripts and images. try to avoid java script on home page.
try some online website tool to check your website gradding
yslow and firebug is a good plugin to check. stats

also test on http://websitegradder.com for overall report