Developing websites today requires interaction with users and 'something' to keep users coming back. Creating a website is no longer simply throwing up images, copy, and hope your site achieves everything you desire.

Adobe Flash used to be widely used to achieve a rich user experience with websites, but JavaScript has made a reappearance and taken charge of creating the desired user experiences. Once a website has been launched, you simply can't help it but enhance it - and don't be shamed, it's worth it. But often we add too much way too quickly and everyone may not have a super fast Internet connection like you do.

Whilst writing JavaScript or CSS, it's good practice to keep your files separate, but when a user downloads all your files, it's all the initial server requests for each file that are slowing down the page the most. You could develop all your JavaScript and CSS in two files, but you can easily go over 5000 lines before you know it - which makes it extremely difficult to develop more, test and debug.

Unfortunately, the more you add to a website the slower it becomes to download and view. Fortunately, there are a million methods or probably just 20 (I haven't counted) to enhance the speed of your website.

Firstly, install YSlow from Yahoo, it also requires Firebug. YSlow offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarises the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.itâ„¢ and JSLint.

Read through each suggestion YSlow supplies and you will find your site's download and viewing speeds increase with every change. As to speeding up the JavaScript and CSS files, I recommend Minify to combine the multiple CSS or Javascript files, remove unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serve them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache headers.

By using Minify, you can reduce the time taken to download your site by over 300% simply reducing the number of files to download.