Image Options for Better Web Performance

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 April 2013 02:34 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 23 April 2013 12:00

If you read articles on best practices you will quickly read that one of the best ways to increase performance is to limit your calls to the server as well as “shrink” the size of those files.  Implementing and keeping up with all of the options can actually take a full time job.  However as a small business web developer, I have realized that just implementing some of these can have a profound impact to your site.  We are always loading “assets” from the server to support a page.  These “assets” might include, images, javascript libraries, style sheets, video, audio, etc.  Better managing these assets not only improves performance but in some cases also lowers the band-width requirements.  We are very visual people so it has been my experience that the areas for great performance is to address the images first and then move on to the other areas. I am not saying that the other areas aren’t important but rather some of the little things you can do to images can improve a lot towards performance. My goal is talk about some of the available options as well as give you some thoughts and links that make this even easier.

How to Compress Your CSS With {cms_stylesheet}

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 12:55 Written by Ken Griffith Tuesday, 5 June 2012 12:00

CMS Made Simple attaches stylesheets to a page template with the {cms_stylesheet} tag. Since CMSMS version 1.10, this tag will automatically concatenate all of the stylesheets for a given media type into one CSS file.

You may not be aware that since version 1.10, you can use SMARTY tags inside of CMS Made Simple stylesheets. With a couple of small tricks, you can use this to compress your stylesheets.

Using [[strip]] Tags

In CMS Made Simple stylesheets, we use [[double braces]] instead of {curly brackets} as the SMARTY delimiter. This saves using a ridiculous number of {literal} tags.