[RKearney]

No no no! Unless you absolutely need your content encrypted, all this does is add unnecessary latency to your site for the SSL handshakes. If your site hosts zero external content, and all of your content is hosted from the same domain, this wouldn't be as big of an issue. However, most sites host content from 4-5 different domains, which means you're going to have 4-5 different SSL handshakes, thus resulting in a much slower page load.

[fotbr]

If you're constantly pulling content from 4-5 different domains, perhaps you should re-think your sites architecture to minimize that. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but a lot of the time it's simply due to laziness or because the web developers are practicing the cargo-cult method of development.

Yes, this means you probably need to re-evaluate whether your "like/share/connect/plusone this" really needs to be on every page, or even any page.

You also need to re-evaluate whether you really need statistics via third parties, or if you can track them yourselves. The answer is almost always that you can do it yourself, though it might not be as convenient as, say, copy/pasting google analytics code into your template.

If you're using a content engine, take a close look at it. Turn off and remove features you don't use, don't merely hide them. You might also be surprised which plugins may be phoning home in some form, or pulling content from places you didn't expect.

[rimantas]

  > If you're constantly pulling content from 4-5 different
  > domains, perhaps you should re-think your sites
  > architecture to minimize that.

And if you are not you may be interested in doing that — browsers have limited number of connections per domain so splitting your assets across 2-4 domains allows to download more resources in parallel.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#split

[fotbr]

Or, simplify your pages. The current direction of web development and design -- having hundreds or even thousands (yes, thousands) of assets in a single page is often counter productive, and borderline stupid.