Speed should be feature #1 on any website. In this talk from the 2010 O’Reilly Velocity Conference, Urs Holzle of Google lists some of ways that individual websites and the public Internet can be significantly sped up with minor tweaks.
The protocols that the Internet runs on, like TCP, have held up remarkably well over time but were not designed for the high speed networks we have today. Research projects at Google have found how simple, unobtrusive changes to these protocols can noticeably speed up web sites. Other incremental improvements in things like DNS, header caching, and SSL add up to improvements of 50% or more.
Google has several other projects to speed up the Internet experience for regular users. Their Chrome browser is one of the fastest and they have shared that technology by open sourcing parts of its technology. They host a fast public DNS server that anyone can use. They also have several tools for web developers to diagnose and improve speed problems on their websites. They do all of this because users enjoy and spend more time and money on fast websites.
