Load Time – Speed

[eheller]

Hi Jason, I’m currently running v 1.15 Akita and contemplating the upgrade. I’ve been struggling with site speed for some time, and working on different theories. I’m hopeful that upgrading the theme will have some positive impact.

One of the things I’ve noticed when running YSlow on my page (as well as the demo Akita site, and another site I found here on the forum running Akita) is the Grade F I get for HTTP requests. Specifically:
Grade F on Make fewer HTTP requests
This page has 11 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 13 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.
This page has 12 external background images. Try combining them with CSS sprites.
Understand, I’m not pointing fingers, and for all I know this has little impact on my site’s load time, which – as you probably will point out – rightly so – involves many factors.

So my question – are there any changes in the update that were done to specifically address load time, or the items above? Does it make sense to remove references to external scripts that relate to styles I’m not using? And if you have any thoughts on the YSlow results, I’d love to know them.

Thanks – as always.

Eric

Topic

[Jason Bobich]

Hello Eric,

These are definitely reasonable concerns. The more assets you include and scripts you run, this is all going to take a toll on how your site loads. But with all the functionality, we want to make sure and keep to WP standards and keep CSS files and javascript files separate and enqueued properly so developers can handle them, and adjust what they want to include.

But luckily there are great plugins out there like W3 Total Cache. This is going to tackle almost all of the things coming up with your tests. It’ll minify and compress all of your scripts and CSS files if you want. — But we make sure to not do this by default, and leave it your hands, so you have the flexibility to handle this in whatever way works best for you.

[Author]

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