If all 3 stylesheets have to be loaded on the first visit, the load time should increase some, however, one way around this would be have only the stylesheets that are required on the first visit to be loaded. After the first visit the load time should be faster since the files should be cached ... I think.
No, in fact it will take longer thanks to handshaking. Once it's on the user's machine, it should be cached. More files == more requests to the server which takes LONGER and creates more load. It's like multiple images in a theme - if you can combine them down it can greatly speed load times due to less requests to the server. You take a site from 60 files and reduce it to 20 separate files, that can be as much as 40 seconds off the page load time for dialup/cable users on a bad day... and even the BEST connection right on top of the server that's at least 4 seconds shaved off; time completely unrelated to the speed of the connection and entirely related to it's latency and that of every server, router and gateway between the user and yours. Generally you are better off putting effort into reducing like properties, checking for conflicts/overrides that could result in dead code, and making sure you aren't wasting bandwidth on bad markup like tables for layout, endless nested tables, endless nested DIV, accessibility /FAIL/ like like DHTML, faulty/unrealistic methodologies like alpha .png, or other evident signs of waste - like 80k of markup for 3.2k of content and 22 content images. (which by my estimates would mean it should have less than 10k or markup). Also avoid bullshit 'gee ain't it neat' technologies that bloat out a page for nothing - jquery, mootools - in 90% of cases CSS can do any 'effects' needed and when it doesn't the script would probably run faster and be a quarter the size without the stupid framework. Though do you have a particular site in mind? I can point out where your optimization efforts would be best pointed.
dethshadow thanks for this useful information.. so I will post that site for review.. currently im using 5 stylesheets and getting this response Download Time: Time Taken To Download On A 56Kbs Modem 15.90 Seconds On 128Kbs DSL 6.96 Seconds On 512Kbs DSL/Cable 1.74 Seconds On 1024Kbps DSL/Cable 0.87 Seconds nowdays I dot think someone is using speed blower than 512..
dont assume, what if your next customer was usng dialup but closed your page before ordering because it was too slow?
does dialup still exist in world. anyway I will review it again.. but I wonder one big style sheet can take more time to download and form into page but I will check that too. Thanks dude
there are places with dialup as the only option, and there are people that share an internet connection, making it slow (ie colleges, work) Edit: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/...How-many-dialup-users-want-broadband.aspx?r=1 according to that, last year 7% of people with internet still have dialup.
Hello. I am working with websites every day and in your case I would check your website with the Firefox Plugins YSlow and PageSpeed. The tipps of those tools are really helpful. I would also merge all Javascripts in to one file (if possible) and also merge all CSS files into one file, minify every JS and CSS file, crunch graphics and recheck with YSlow and PageSpeed. If you are the owner of the machine that hosts the site you should also check your settings according caching of files. Those settings can reduce loading time/http requests a lot! Regards, Michael
As mentioned, that's an assumption, and a really bad one. Large areas of the US where the population density is low; Upstate NH/Western ME, backwoods VT, much less the American midwest like Utah, Colorado and the Dakota's there are millions of users where 33.6 is a GOOD DAY. You figure in the limited bandwidth on many phone/handheld plans, the horrible ping-time of things like sattelite internet (which if it's not in the satellite cache it defaults to using the dialup connection - which is the only upstream those users have!) - much less if you're in a workplace where each workstation has it's pipe throttled to 128kbps or LESS; or even sharing a connection with a roommate who's a torrent junkie. Those numbers you pulled up (that firefox tool I assume?) is only for the file SIZES and does not last time I checked consider the ping time in regards to handshaking. While you haven't linked to the page you are referring to as yet, let us use the link in your signature as an example. The BEST tool IMHO for figuring out how bad a site is going to be is the "document size" tool under "information" in the FF Web developer toolbar. We feed that icon/logo page through it (Which BTW appears to be broken and/or not loading one of your stylesheets in Opera - either that or all that javascripted bullcookies is failing miserably) and we come up with this: Documents (8 files) 25 KB (130 KB uncompressed) Images (129 files) 634 KB Objects (1 file) 38 KB Scripts (19 files) 142 KB (391 KB uncompressed) Style Sheets (3 files) 27 KB Total 865 KB (1219 KB uncompressed) At 865k AFTER compression you are five times the upper limit I allow myself to have any single page be UNCOMPRESSED. Your scripts ALONE AFTER COMPRESSION are double my comfort zone for writing any single page on a site! ... and I don't see a damned thing in there which warrants 99% of the scripting. You've got 391k of javascript - FOR WHAT?!? OF course, it starts with the stupid jquery bull and gets worse from there. Javascript for menus, javasscript for tooltip type hints, javascript fro bbcode parsing, on and on and on... The 130k of HTML is a holy hannah, given there's only 4.6k of CDATA (aka text content) on the entire page; Yor are wasting 1.2 MEGABYTES on delivering it!!! Even after compression you are looking at 865K - you take the el-cheapo $14/mo 768kbps plan Verizon has that's ten seconds or so just for the file transfer; but look at the handshaking time... It's 160 files; at a 'real world ideal' 200ms apiece that's 32 seconds of overhead REGARDLESS of how fast the connection is on the first time someone visits the page and it's not in their cache! With first impressions being EVERYTHING that's not good. This is borne out by the page taking over 40 seconds to load here on my 22MBPS downstream connection. All to deliver a dozen content images and less than 5k of text? ... and 129 images for WHAT? I'm seeing maybe a dozen or less images that qualify as content, while the all those silly icons could be composited down to a single file (excepting maybe the one animated one)... ... and there's accessibility problems top to bottom too - no graceful degradation for images off, CSS off, or javascript off; the last being the greatest sin since it appears MOST of the content is dynamically generated; ALSO a miserable /FAIL/ at web development. Much less all the broken layout elements to go with the broken code. If your site in question bears any resemblance to that one, my advice is to throw it ALL away and start over with minimalist semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, image recombination techniques to reduce the number of handshakes (there is rarely ANY reason for a page theme without content to have more than 20 images) and use scripting just to ENHANCE functionality, not supplant it...