Chapter 11: Optimizing Your Theme

Drupal themes are what give websites their own unique look. This chapter explores the impact of creating overly complex designs with many images, CSS files, and external JavaScripts. It will take a fresh look at CSS and JavaScript aggregation, previously discussed in Chapter 2. It will also review best practices for using images, and how the size of images affects page load times. Finally, it will look at how to get a complex looking design without negatively slowing down the time it takes for each page to load.

1. Images
   1. Multiple HTTP Requests
   2. File size
2. CSS
   1. Inline Styles
   2. External CSS files
   3. Caching
   4. Aggregation
   5. Compression
3. JavaScript
   1. Inline
   2. External
   3. Caching
   4. Aggregation
   5. Compression
4. Optimizations
   1. Multiple sub-domains
   2. Browser Cookies
   3. Far-Future Expiration
   4. JQuery