[currysausage]

I'm not ignoring anything, I'm describing the philosophy behind sites like these: It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. [1]

Many seem to believe that there is some secret sauce involved in making web pages load fast. There isn't. Server-side caching is no rocket science. The key is to keep everything so simple that you have the overview over every delivered byte at all times.

Take a look at the HTML of forum.dlang.org. It's so simple, if it wasn't minified, I could immediately start working on this site. When someone asks me to work on some existing wiki or blog template, I usually spend an hour removing unused code first and I still struggle to find my way around the codebase. At that point, maintaining efficiency becomes impossible.

When you have a simple codebase, you may add a font, avatars, and jQuery. The trick is to think about whether you need it, not throw it in "just in case." Specifically, some tiny avatars won't hurt overall performance as long as the page doesn't need to be redrawn. Therefore, always specify width and height attributes for your img elements in HTML or CSS.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint_Exup%C3%A9ry#...