A quick loading website is always preferred by majority of users, but adding more beauty to the website often makes the web pages bulky and a webmaster ends up with a slow loading website.
A webpage consists of the HTML code and other page elements such as cascading style sheets (CSS), javaScript files (.js) and images.
Following are few tips for you to optimize the load time of a website.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests – as I told you, a page output is usually a combination of the HTML code, combined with other files such as css, js and images. As far as possible try to reduce the number of dependent files on a page. For example, you may use a single css file instead of including styles from 2 or 3 style sheets. Combine js files and if possible consolidate into one. Images – those are the main culprits most of the time, try to use images with lesser kB’s and reduce the number of images in a page. For example for background coloring, you may use CSS rather than an image.
Yahoo has a best document for web page load time improvement – Read it here.