Has anyone had a lot of luck with website load time/compression by combining all their css files into 1 file?
I know this has been discussed in other threads, but no one has offered hard numbers to say either yes or no.
The files I’m looking to compress would be:
ajxmenu.css
dropdown.css
print.css
styles.base.css
styles.css
styles.ie.css
Some of these files have very little css in them, so I’m debating whether this is even worth the risk. If, however, there would be a substantial change to my site then I would take the time to do.
Thanks in advance to anyone who chimes in.
www.letstalkchef.com
Personally I think the speed increase is not worth the benefits. Plus it makes it much harder to upgrade to the next version of cs-cart
[url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=21048&highlight=combine+css[/url]
This is one that CS-Cart should do standard. At least the styles.css and styles.base.css. I understand add-ons being separate.
Note that when a new skin is loaded that the styless.base.css comes from the ‘base’ skin and includes all css for the site. The styles.css is the css that is specific to the skin.
The could combine them in one file when the skin is loaded but then it makes it very difficult to identify if the file has changed during an upgrade.
Depending on the number of css files that are loaded and how many different sites they might be loaded from could make significant impact.
For my site, everything is loaded from a single domain. After a browser cache flush, I see times of anywhere from 52ms up to 920ms. My site loads 9 different css files.
Even if I spend 2 seconds loading css, having it separate for maintainability purposes gives me much more value that shaving 1 second off the load time. But then my visitors don’t usually come from a search engine or other engines that use a ranking. Most of my visitors come from links and they are looking specifically for what I offer. Hence, waiting an extra second is not big deal.