We recently returned from our first trip to South by Southwest Interactive. It lived up to expectations - overwhelming, exciting, eye opening, exhausting and full of amazing people and ideas would all be suitable descriptors of the event.   It's near impossible to summarise the key themes from SXSW as there were thousands of speakers covering topics as diverse as government, entrepreneurialism, startups, culture, entertainment, social media, mobile, retail, gaming, science, space, health and medicine to name a few. The wealth and diversity of content there was literally mind blowing.

Most of us know that website speed is important. You've most likely heard about the effect page loading time can have on page abandonment. Google, Amazon, Mozilla and Yahoo have all shown why website speed matters, with Amazon for instance increasing its revenue by 1% for every 100ms of improved page load time. In 2010, Google announced that site speed would be used as a search ranking factor. But we already know that website speed is important because we all have experienced slow websites and the frustration of feeling like we're back on 56k modems. Even though our own website wasn't in the slow website bracket, we wanted to show our users (and our clients) how making some small tweaks can actually make your website lightening fast. Here's how we did it.