NYCPHP Meetup

[John Campbell]

>  8) What factors determine your recommended maximum home page size (in
>  kilobytes)? How are the factors related?

My answer:

The number of kilobytes is irrelevant to the user.  Page load time is
what matters.
To improve the page load time, the following items are a good idea:
1) Minimize the number of TCP connections -- make sure keep alive is turned on
2) Minimize Number of HTTP requests required -- use css sprites,
consolidate scripts/css.
3) Make sure the page progressively renders. -- if you get a white
flash in IE, you are doing something wrong
4) Remove unnecessary blocking javascript -- e.g. analytics code
should be defered, ads should be placed at the end of the page and
positioned with css if possible.
5) Use expires http headers.
6) Gzip all js/css/html.
7) Use subdomains to get around the 2 connection limit.
8) Replace complicated float layouts with tables  -- standards freaks
hate this, but Google uses tables all the time because they care more
about page render time than standards conformance.
9) Optimize all images for the web.  -- use the "save for web" feature
in photoshop.  It strips out all the unnecessary metadata and
optimizes the palette.

Page size is rarely the issue.

-John C.