mxyzplk
Explorer
Hi! Like the new ENWorld look. I noticed it was loading a little slow (takes like 12 seconds for the front page) and poked around a little for why. (Firefox + Firebug + YSlow are your friends.)
The biggest problem is the 28 separate JavaScript files, they each block parallel downloads and take a lot of time. You should combine them into one or at least a smaller number and move them to the bottom of the HTML. Also, you're loading the same scripts multiple times (builder.js, effects.js, dragdrop.js, controls.js) which is redundant. Combine, move to the bottom, and minify them using JSMin or similar. Or YUI, which I see you're using; it has a minifier too. The total page weight is like 800k but your images are very well reduced; more than half of the weight is the JavaScript. Actually I can't imagine all that JS is really being used either; remove anything that's not actively executed (
You should consider using the Apache2 modules to 1) add Expires headers to allow at least 24 hour caching of the images, JS, and CSS (mod_expires) and 2) activate gzip delivery (mod_deflate). Those will also mitigate the issue.
If you do these things I'd estimate at least a 50% performance improvement, perhaps more.
The biggest problem is the 28 separate JavaScript files, they each block parallel downloads and take a lot of time. You should combine them into one or at least a smaller number and move them to the bottom of the HTML. Also, you're loading the same scripts multiple times (builder.js, effects.js, dragdrop.js, controls.js) which is redundant. Combine, move to the bottom, and minify them using JSMin or similar. Or YUI, which I see you're using; it has a minifier too. The total page weight is like 800k but your images are very well reduced; more than half of the weight is the JavaScript. Actually I can't imagine all that JS is really being used either; remove anything that's not actively executed (
You should consider using the Apache2 modules to 1) add Expires headers to allow at least 24 hour caching of the images, JS, and CSS (mod_expires) and 2) activate gzip delivery (mod_deflate). Those will also mitigate the issue.
If you do these things I'd estimate at least a 50% performance improvement, perhaps more.
