How can I minimize the weight of my ASP.NET pages?

Question

I rely heavily on nested Master Pages in my web portal, this causes ASP.NET to generate huge ID tags for controls it creates, for example: "ctl00_ctl00_MainBody_ctl00_lblDescription"

for a lblDescription Label i've created.

Is there any way to reduce this clutter?

Any other techniques(sorry for being general) to reduce page weight other than removing the viewstate?

Answer 1

• Look at Yslow and do what it tells you (I would start here)
• Turn off viewstate
• Use jsmin to reduce the size of your JavaScript files
• Reduce the size of your CSS ^{(dead link)}
• Compress your response with standard gzip/deflate compression
• Using ASP.NET MVC will give you smaller IDs

Answer 2

Whenever possible use HTML Controls. HTML Controls. They are lighter since don't have server-side objects unless you specify the runat="server" attribute.