Following are some steps to increase page loading speed:

Step 1: HTML Design

Use Div based html design for your website. Table based design will take more loading time as compare to div based design.

Step 2: Use External JavaScript and CSS Files

Inline CSS will increases the rendering time of a web page. When we use external CSS and JavaScript files browser will cache external resources in first time loading. It will also makes site maintenance easier because we need to change in the global files.

Step 3: Defer Loading Content When Possible

Use Ajax if need to change any small content of the page instead to load the complete page. Ajax allows to build web pages that can be asynchronously updated at any time. That means instead of reloading an entire page when a user performs an action, we can simply update parts of that page.

Step 4: Compress Images

Compress all the images for web-based quality to using image compressor script or plugin. It will reduce the loading time because heavy files/images will take too much time when render on the page.

Step 5: Put JavaScript at the End of Files

Put all the scripts at the end of the page rather than at the beginning. Doing this browser gets authority to render everything before getting started with the JavaScript. This will helps the web pages to feel more responsive because the way JavaScript works is that it blocks anything below it from rendering until it has finished downloading.

Step 6: Using CSS Sprites

An css sprite is a collection of many images put into a single image. This will helps to reduce the loading time. To speed up a website if you combine 3 images into one CSS sprite, as this will allow a browser to load one image instead of 3 images.

Step 7: Gzip your CSS and JavaScript

Gzip is much like normal zip that you use almost everyday. It is a tool used to compress files down to their smallest size so that when they are sent to the browser they use less network bandwidth.

We need to add some line of code in the .htaccess file:

#Begin gzip and deflate
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon
</IfModule>

Step 8: Avoid Redirects

Redirections take time. The more you have, the longer it takes your user to get to the page you are redirecting them to.Avoid using them where ever you can.

Step 9: Utilize browser caching

If we use browser caching, were explicitly instructing browsers to cash particular files for a specified period of time. When the file is needed again, the browser is to pull from its local cache instead of requesting it from the server again.

Following are some code which tell our browsers to cash the files for some period of time:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType text/html M3600
    ExpiresByType text/css M3600
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript M3600
    ExpiresByType image/bmp M3600
    ExpiresByType image/gif M3600
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon M3600
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg M3600
</IfModule>

Conclusion : If you used all the above steps to develop your website then youre on your way to a much faster website. There are also some more techniques to optimize database which is help to improve website speed to display data using queries from the database.

Following is the tool to check website speed:-

Pingdom: Test how fast your site is before and after making changes