Faster Loading

I’ve installed a wordpress script for a auto comunity and, after I’ve installed some more plugins, built up a theme and made some other “tunnings” I’ve noticed that it doesn’t load so fast. It’s clear why. The tons of javascript that are beeing included and all the extra code from the widgets and the other stuff that was added are not good for loading time.

I’ve noticed the same problem with all all wordpress blogs.
My question is: Has anybody tried to improve the loading time?

Ofcourse, we don’t all have the same plugins installed etc but there are some fat plugins that everybody uses, like AIO Seo, Akismet, Polls, a photo gallery, some other fancy features using Ajax.

There are some plugins better that others. Maybe a faster photo gallery, a better Ajax implementation, a better poll etc. I even saw the ajaxprototipe file being loaded and it’b big and the script related to it are only using a very small part of it.