One of the biggest factors in the usability of your website is its perceived performance. While the vagaries of the Internet can make even the snappiest site bog down from time to time, there are some things you can do to speed up your site:

	Optimize your images A 16 color GIF file is less than half the size of a 256 color GIF, which means it will load in less than half the time. Another technique is to use a small image, and tell the browser that it's a larger size - the browser will resize the image for you.
	Pregenerate pages If you're generating the same page over and over again, why not cache the results? Not only will subsequent hits on the page take less time, there will be less overall load on your server.
	Break up and simplify large tables Web browsers can't render a table until they've seen all of it, which means that exceptionally long tables take a long time to render. Netscape Navigator also has problems rendering deeply nested tables. Rather than leaving your users staring at a mostly blank window, break the tables into smaller pieces.
	Optimize your server Instead of having one server process handle everything, segment the workload. Each server process can then run faster, since it isn't carrying around unneeded bloat. Also, make sure you turn off unneeded services (such as host name lookups). Not only does this make your server faster, it's one less thing that hackers can attack.

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