Reducing load time, or making the user think the load time is less

Question

I've been working on a website, and we've managed to reduce the total content for a page load from 13.7MiB's to 2.4, but the page still takes forever to load.

It's a joomla site (ick), and it has a lot of redundant DOM elements (2000+ for the home page), and make 60+ HttpRequest's per page load, counting all the css, js, and image requests. Unlike drupal, joomla won't merge them all on the fly, and they have to be kept separate or else the joomla components will go nuts.

What can I do to improve load time?

Things I've done:

• Added colors to dom elements that have large images as their background so the color is loaded, then the image
• Reduced excessively large images to much smaller file sizes
• Reduced DOM elements to ~2000, from ~5000
• Loading CSS at the start of the page, and javascript at the end
  • Not totally possible, joomla injects it's own javascript and css and it does it at the header, always.
• Minified most javascript
• Setup caching and gziping on server

Uncached size 2.4MB, cached is ~300KB, but even with so many dom elements, the page takes a good bit of time to render.

What more can I do to improve the load time?

Answer 1

Check out this article.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/

If the link gets removed or lost the tools mentioned are:

• YSlow (by Yahoo)
• Google's Page speed
• AOLs web page test
• Smush.it (Image compression tool)

Answer 2

It sounds like you've done a great job of working around the real problem: those giant graphics. You can probably squeeze some more efficiency out of caching, minifying, etc., but there has to be a way to reduce the size of the images. I worked with a team of some of the pickiest designers on Earth and they never required uncompressed JPEGs. Do you mean images cut out of Photoshop and saved on full quality (10)? If so, the real solution (and I appreciate that you may not be able to accomplish this) is to have a hard conversation where you explain to the design company, "You are not your users." If the purpose of the site is to only impress other visual designers with the fidelity of your imagery, maybe it's ok. If the purpose of the site is to be a portfolio that gains your company work, they need to re-asses who their audience is and what the audience wants. Which, I'm guessing, is not 2 minute load times.