high performance web sites

I’ve spend the last few days optimizing My Opera for faster loading, using the 14 rules from Steve Souders (Yahoo!) excellent book High Performance Web Sites.

I saw Nate Koechley from Yahoo! present these rules at a Web conference in London a long time ago and I’ve wanted to implement them since then, but I had not got around to it until earlier this week when Sverre got the book and put it on my desk. :)

There’s much that can be done to speed up My Opera. We have done a few things already, such as moving all scripts to the bottom of the page, and we aim to do a lot more in the future.

The Hills Have Eyes II ipod

For this My Opera update I’ve decided to focus on getting fewer HTTP requests and smaller files sizes for the My Opera ui.

If we take a closer look at the images that are used for the My Opera ui today we can see that it’s 27 images (depending on what page you look at) with a total file size of 71,3 KB robbie williams intensive care mp3 . That’s the backgrounds for the main layout, the logo, menu, icons for the top bar, tabs for sub menus, etc (I’m only including the images that are used for the ui, not the ones in the page content).

The challenge with optimizing this is that the ui for the upcoming My Opera release will contain even more icons than before, because of the drop down menus, and we still needed to make it smaller.

So, how do you think it went?

Quite well actually. The result for the new site is 8 images and 21,8 KB! :)

There is of course a lot more that can be done, and we will continue working on this.

Stay tuned for more posts on this topic.