Step 1: Set yourself an ambitious target and fixate on it until you get it
This is an absolute must. If you don't have a target, then you're unlikley to keep pushing. You must your set yourself an ambitious target and strive to achieve it BEFORE you start optimizing. For us, our target was to reduce the load time of the frontpage to less than 1.5 seconds AND get at least 85% on both Pagespeed and YSlow.
Our end result is a load time of 1.29s, total page size of 149KB and total number of requests being 28. Not too bad
On to the nitty gritty...
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