Best Tips For Cutting Loading Times?
 

With Google now giving better search rankings to sites which are optimized for loading speeds, I'm starting to look more closely at this.

What are your best tips for cutting loading times, apart from the obvious items:

(1) Gzip compression enabled on your server

(2) Optimizing the images you're serving

Also..... do you guys see a big benefit from using image sprites rather than individual image files?
Here's some tips you might comment on, for added value:

5 Asset Management Tricks for Faster Websites | Jon Raasch's Blog

Caching images (I have set cache through .htaccess).

1. Use file caching and/or a load balancer and CDN network setup,
2. Avoid excessive database (MySQL) queries,
3. Optimize your MySQL databases and tables,
4. Correct any CSS duplication,
5. Consolidate CSS and Javascript files when possible and minimize the code (as opposed to maximized code for editing).

That can shave a few seconds off load times.
Sprites can help but are mostly mental masturbation -- saving milliseconds will not make that much difference.

You should also cut rendering times by putting javascript to footer if possible. CSS too if possible, but javascript has usually bigger impact.

You can also speed up load time by using more parallel downloads for objects those are not important for SEO; like banners, etc. You can increase the number of parallel downloads by putting the files to subdomain, etc (different domain). I have done it with subdomain. The parallel download limit is per domain and increasing the number of domains you can get more parallel downloads. I have seen some tests those have had best results with multiple domains, but I have seen best impact with just one additional (sub)domain.

For example if your regular file path is: Example Domain, when you put some files into www.pics.example.com]400 - Bad Request you can get those files to download parallel with the files from your main site.

Get a VPS at VULTR, Ramnode, Leaseweb etc...

Install Debian Jessie

Install nginx-extras, mariadb-server, php5-fpm

Setup Zend Cache in php.ini

Install Wordpress Supercache

Win.

In a Google+ Webmaster Hangout, Google’s John Mueller indicated that page speed might not be a ranking factor anymore.

https://blog.seoprofiler.com/2015/04...actor-anymore/

Page speed is for your UX...

Optimizing is good but the main thing I see is people using heavy sites, wordpress, plugins and they throw it on an overloaded server or $3 shared hosting. Good underloaded VPS or Dedicated and optimizing will be a bonus and not a requirement. Good Server #1 Optimizing #2 :2 cents: