lammert - 7:15 pm on May 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

The main reduction of load time was caused by combining many images to one. This site has a menu bar which originally consisted of one image per selection. All these images have now been combined in one large image with a client-side map to link areas of that large image to different URLs.

JavaScript files were also combined to one large JavaScript file. Many browsers stop downloading and rendering other content while downloading and parsing JavaScript files. Combining JavaScript files in one large file causes only one such rendering stop which on average gives a faster overall rendering speed than loading smaller JavaScript files sequentially.

JavaScript has been moved to the last part of the HTML code. This doesn't change the overall load time much, but it allows the first part of the page to be rendered and displayed in the browser before the JavaScript part is starting to delay the processing. The visitor can start reading while the browser parses the last part of the page.