Tips for optimising the speed of your website
The loading time of your website is crucial. If your site is slow, Search Engines will punish you and visitors will abandon your page quicker than you can say “I should have done that”.
Image optimisation
Use the right dimensions (don’t scale anything), optimise your images for web and look at using Sprites (more further down).
CSS optimisation
Getting rid of any unnecessary CSS is a good start, but it’s often hard to know what is superfluous - and in the past it has been a lengthy process to determine. Here, though, is the tool for you: Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension that helps you find unused CSS selectors.
Also, we would advise you to run your CSS code through a CSS compressor - we strongly recommend you go and check out the CSS compressor page.
There are other elements you should look at like cache control and javaScript compression, but do the above first and you are off to a good start.
Two other tools we would like to bring to your attention are: 1.The Page Speed lab (from Google) and 2. A tool from Yahoo called yslow.
Image Sprites: If you are new to the concept of Image Sprites, think of them as a collage of all (or most) of the images on your website in one image. By using a Sprite, the host server then only gets one request for the images instead of multiple requests for individual images.
