As I was redesigning this site, and preparing to redirect my domain to it - I decided that I would hold off on performing the optimization that is important to every website. Instead, I thought I would create a series of posts about the process - step by step so we can all witness how the site improves which each optimization performed. I'm going to try to go in the order presented by Yahoo and their YSlow firefox plugin, in order to present actual numbers related to the changes.
Currently, the site is totally unoptimized. I haven't removed redundant or unused styles from the CSS. The javascript isn't minified, its in the header, and each plugin is a separate file. Let's see what YSlow starts us with:
[singlepic id=8 w=274 h=150 float=right] If you enlarge the image, you'll see that we're starting off with a grade of F... and a numeric grade of 39. The current size of the homepage is about 600k, and the time to load is around six seconds. Looks like there's a lot of room for improvement there. The first item of concern for YSlow is the number of http requests, currently topping 17 - with 12 javascript files and 5 css files. For our next installment, we'll try to reduce this as close to 1 and 1 as possible.
See you then.