tips for getting webpage K size down

[sodani]

Does anyone know of any articles on this?

I've heard of saving jpegs at 60-65 in photoshop and not using progressive jpegs. For backgrounds images that can be repeated, to use the smallest possible image size.

Anyone have other tips?

[maccas]

Less white space can make a big difference, external css and javascript.

[buckworks]

- CSS instead of javascript for rollover effects can reduce a lot of code clutter

- Reduce the number of images on the page. In particular, avoid using images for jobs that could be done by well-styled text.

- Assess your pages with a hard-nosed editor's eye and eliminate "fluff". Do you really need a javascript doodad that tells your users what day it is, or the temperature in your home town?

- This isn't about page size, but it does affect loading speed. Be careful about the number of external sources that must be contacted in order to display everything on your page. Every additional connection will add to the page load time.

If you have the body text coming from your own server, ad banners coming from someone else's server, an Adsense panel or two, a chunk of analytics code coming from yet another server, the temperature display from still another server, and someone else's Tell-a-Friend script ... pruning some of those extra connections would improve the loading speed.

[pageoneresults]

You could also look at http compression. I've been experiencing savings at times in the 75-80% range. I just ran a test to verify and here are the actual numbers...

Original size: 16146 bytes
Compressed size: 4170 bytes
Savings: 11976 bytes
Percentage saved by compression: 75.0%
Transfer speed improvement: 3.8 X

I keep small files to begin with. After compression, they are "very lean". I still cater to a 56k audience. :)

[tedster]

saving jpegs at 60-65 in photoshop

The compression algorithms in ImageReady (Photoshop's "Save For the Web" function) are even better than Photoshop's core compression functions. In addition, ImageReady does not embed extra xml data into the image file, but Photoshop itself does.

I find with ImageReady that I can regularly go down to 40% jpg compression with no distracting artifacts. These compression algo improvements are particularly dramatic for images that include text over a photo or drawing.

Also consider the pixel dimensions of an image. Cutting it by just 10% - 20% in each linear direction gives even more significant savings in the final "squared" value.