How to make ProductCart Faster?

I have recently went live with my website, and have noticed that on everytime the page loads it seems to be taking a while.  The header has to almost reload it self everytime without having any memory of loading the same photos.  Thinking that it was the size of the photos, i saved them as .gifs instead of .jpgs but I am still having a problem.  If I am experiencing this slow page load with a fast connection, I am afraid how long it would take for some one to load my page that doesnt have fast speed internet.  

Is there something Im missing?  Is there something I should be focusing on?  Something in the code that I should change?  I was thinking it has something to do with the amount of products I have (2700), but I plan on getting more than 20,000 up there.  How do I make this thing zoom?  Do I need to do something with caching?  And I think of myself as a newbie, so if you reply please be descriptive.  My website it www.ShopAtDean.com

Thanks,
Mike

Hi,
  Are you using the dynamic or static menus? The static / generated menu (which is way more commonly used) is more efficient as it doesn't interrogate the database each time.
You banner image is 87.59 kB - Optimise it more & switch to a JPEG.
Your images below the banner, such as syracusecollection vary between 68kb & 112kb , again some optimisation would help, but the images should all be only downloaded once by the browser & then served from the local copy anyway, so most likely optimization will only help on the "first impression" of the 1st page download.

You would probably be very surprised to know your menu (on the left) is 78kb out of a total HTML size of 114kb - nearly 70% of the HTML component of the page. 
Consider restricting the number (depth) of sub-categories displayed. As an experiment temporarily remove the menu & see what difference it makes to the page load times.

You also have 12 css files, one of which is pcHeaderFooter, which is being loaded twice.
The second copy probably by embedded.css which contains an incude for it.

The store URL switches to an IP address, which indicates the store url is probably not set correctly in the includes/storeconstants file.

IE renders the page very late compared with FireFox, so pages always seem slower on IE - Google is your friend :-) Investigate It's worth investigating the process IE follows to render pages and "optimising" your desigh to match - it won't slow Fire|Fox down but should speed up the render times in IE.

Your total "page weight" based on saving the entire home page via IE "Save As" is 1.35mb as compared with an EI demo store which I measured as 0.35mb - so it looks like there is quite a lot of room for optimization  :-)

HTH
   Hamish

I just took a look at your site and it took way too long to load.

Hi Mike,
    It's definitely loading faster. The left hand navigation is still by IP address & I think you can afford to optimise the header image a bit less - The "Shop at Dean" text is now a bit fuzzy.

Hi Mike,
  Have you re-generated your navigation? You can do so via the admin pages : Settings > Generate Navigation.