How to make a website run faster?

I'm into my first 3 months of web development and I have been dabbling with some server side scripting in the form of ColdFusion, along with some Javascript, JQuery and CSS.

I have read about CSS optimization and would like to know what are the other pertinent factors contributing to the better performance of a website. What all factors can a developer profile and optimize?

How much part does picking (or rather I should say recommending) a particular browser play in this performance hunt?

cheers

Install YSlow and Pagespeed plugins for Firefox. Then start looking at all of the ways your site is unoptimized. This will be much like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hydrant.

Using minified ( and possibly aggregated ) Javascript and CSS along with a good, healthy far-future-expires is a really good way to start.

• Don't forget to gzip.
• And use Etags.
• And put your CSS at the top of the document.
• And put the javascript at the end.
• And use separate domains for static resources.
• And avoid URL redirects.
• And remove duplicate javascript and CSS.

And... see what I mean about the fire hydrant!