Recently a friend asked me about the YSlow score of our site and I was surprised to find a score of 86. Well, only good webmasters know how difficult it is to gain those extra milliseconds and reduce the page load time to less than half a second. But when you do, you know you have own half the battle in getting good traffic to your site. So, if you have not tried already I will suggest you to install YSlow and firebug on your Firefox browser and check the score of your website. YSlow not only provides the details of your score counts but also gives valuable suggestion on how to improve the score.
 
It might be out of resources for many webmasters to get their images on a CDN but I find several other optimization suggestions are doable. I am told GZIP compression helps but I find it increases the load on server and thereby could reduce the performance. I will suggest to use that option after taking a few trials on your server load.