Lately I have noticed that page weights are getting out of control, including my own applications.

Recently I spent a whole day getting rid of an unneeded 3rd party component on my company’s application.   In doing so it created an extra benefit, reducing the page weight more then half (288KB to 118KB), that wouldn’t have been achieved leaving the 3rd party component there. While this was not the intent for removing the component it was a delightful find.

That sparked my interest in how else I can improve the page weight and thus the speed of our application.  I started looking for the obvious and easiest things to fix:

• JavaScript in the head and not in an external file.
• CSS in the head and not an external file.
• Images that weren’t optimized for the web.

After those quick fixes I started investigating other things like:

• CSS on elements, why was it there?
• Nested tables and if they could be replaced with divs.

Then I went crazy and started checking things like spaces instead of tabs on the beginning of lines. I know really crazy, but in one large HTML page I reduced it 10KB [so not that crazy =)].

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