I've been working on a website, and we've managed to reduce the total content for a page load from 13.7MiB's to 2.4, but the page still takes forever to load.
It's a joomla site (ick), and it has a lot of redundant DOM elements (2000+ for the home page), and make 60+ HttpRequest's per page load, counting all the css, js, and image requests. Unlike drupal, joomla won't merge them all on the fly, and they have to be kept separate or else the joomla components will go nuts.
What can I do to improve load time?
Things I've done:
Added colors to dom elements that have large images as their background so the color is loaded, then the image
Reduced excessively large images to much smaller file sizes
Reduced DOM elements to ~2000, from ~5000
Loading CSS at the start of the page, and javascript at the end
Not totally possible, joomla injects it's own javascript and css and it does it at the header, always.
Minified most javascript
Setup caching and gziping on server
Uncached size 2.4MB, cached is ~300KB, but even with so many dom elements, the page takes a good bit of time to render.
What more can I do to improve the load time?
