There are some simple things you can do to improve your web site’s performance. The actual things you can do are based somewhat on the structure of your site, but for purposes of this tip, let’s assume that you are using a database to get data and show it on the output page. The first thing you can do is to use pre-defined queries or stored procedures, depending on your database. This feature of most databases allows the database to skip the work involved in optimizing the query. This alone will often speed up operations significantly, depending on the types of queries you’re doing.
Another tip is to only retrieve the fields you need from the database. There’s always a temptation to simply say SELECT * FROM allmytables, when in fact you only need a field or two. Depending on the size of the table, this tip can vary in its effectiveness.
If you have access to Microsoft Transaction Server and the ability to create COM DLLs, you can gain quite a bit of performance by creating an MTS object that handles your database activity. This has the benefit of holding the connection open until a timeout period expires. Since making the connection is the most “expensive” part of getting data, you just chopped your request time down significantly.
If you’re doing a lot of database recordset manipulation in ASP, this is best handled within a COM DLL, since the code is all compiled. I have part of my ad system that is currently in an ASP page. It requests three or four recordsets through an MTS database object, but I will be moving the logic into a COM object and should see the performance improve greatly.
There are more, smaller things that you can try, but these are the big hitters for performance.