As I wrote in the previous post, one of the reasons to move Handy Backup site from table-based layout to CSS-driven div’s was Google Webmaster Central blog’s announcement that they included website speed in search ranking algorithms. Getting rid of endless <table>’s, <tr>’s and <td>’s, as well as optimization of CSS allowed me to reduce raw HTML codes by at least 10KB per page, which has of course made its little contribution to the loading time. But after that I decided to delve further to the subject and found that there are many other things that a webmaster can do to improve his site’s performance and visitor experience.

In this post I’ll discuss what makes up a website’s loading speed and what can be done to fasten it.

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