There are lots of tricks to optimising the speed of your web site. Most of them require you to follow certain design and implementation best practices. But, if you're looking for a quick and (really) easy way to make your site even faster then you should definitely check out the new Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO). Deployment is pretty much copying an assembly to your web server and adding a couple of lines to your web.config - simple.
Here's the official blurb:
What is the RPO?
The RPO (Runtime Page Optimizer) speeds up ASP.NET and SharePoint websites. Its simple. We automated 8 of the guidelines set out in Yahoo's "Best practices for speeding up your site" and checked these with the creators of YSlow to make sure the RPO gives you the fastest website ever. Try the RPO now from www.getrpo.com.
Technical background
The RPO (Runtime Page Optimizer) is a software component for IIS 6/7 web servers that speeds up ASP.NET and SharePoint websites significantly. The component works at runtime - with no development changes, no extra hardware and performs these optimizations:
Combination. Combines JS files, CSS files reducing HTTP requests. It can optionally combine JPEGs and GIFs into CSS sprites to reduce the number of images. This significantly decreases the roundtrips between browser and server reducing page load time
Compression. Minifies and gzip compresses resources, decreasing page load times and data traffic
Caching. Increases speed through caching - automatically setting far future expires on the browser, caching optimized resources on the server, with full control over when both caches are refreshed
Browser aware. Works with all versions of IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari - optimizations are automatically turned on/off to meet the browser's capability
Framework support. Supports ASP.NET 2.0+, AJAX, SharePoint 2007, DotNetNuke, EPiServer
Fast set up. No extra hardware required, no CDN maintenance, no browser software, zero impact installation - component is a single DLL installed on a web server
You decide how fast your pages load. Out-of-the-box the RPO will speed up websites at level-4 optimization. For even greater speed, you can use the RPO to sprite images and combine all JavaScripts into one, you'll just need to ensure your images are correctly scaled and your JavaScripts behave well when combined. This level of optimization usually takes a "milestone" to complete, the RPO reduces the developer effort to hours and keeps your images and scripts in their original maintainable format
Do you need it?
Speed is everything. Unless you've implemented best practices, the website that seems fast on your local machine is often slooooooow when people use it from around the country or internationally. Users hate slooooooow webpages. Asking your customers to wait is like asking them to leave. Try the RPO now from www.getrpo.com.