Critical optimizations for your website

[Laugh10704]

Hello!

 

I'm a big fan of your site (the skyrim version). I'm also a web developer that works a lot with site optimization. I noticed when visiting your site the first time at http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/, that it took a very long time to load (over 15 seconds) on my high speed connection. After investigating, I see that your site is including a GIGANTIC javascript file here:

http://www.nexusmods.com/contents/Scripts/BBoC-ebb38c0dc28aa966c8286fcc3abb19d6.js

This file is over 900Kb and takes 12 seconds to download. That's going to bounce a significant number of new users.

 

The first thing you can do is use a javascript minifier and turn on gzip compression, which gets get the file down to roughly 150kb. This simple change would dramatically reduce the time for the site to load for new users to your site.

 

In addition, you are including the jquery library with your javascript. Instead, remove jQuery and JQuery UI from your javascript file and include it separately by linking to Google's hosted version i.e.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

And for JQuery UI:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.9.2/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>

Google's servers are significantly faster, the files can download in parallel with your other javascript file (which is now much smaller because it doesn't contain jquery), AND you save a lot on bandwidth. It's a huge win!

Edited January 3, 2014 by Laugh10704

[Laugh10704]

Hello again!

 

I noticed some issues with the forums as well. When first visiting the user downloads two large images that are over 250KB each!

http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/style_images/underground/_custom/border_right.gif
http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/style_images/underground/_custom/border_left.gif

By converting these images to JPG instead, the images will be roughly ~25KB each with no noticeable loss in quality.

 

 

 

I also noticed that this large (370KB) javascript file being downloaded is not being gzip compressed:

http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/js/3rd_party/ckeditor/ckeditor.js?nck=3dd166d83264b9d7b7755bb8f6e4f420

You should be able to get it to < 100KB with gzip comperssion enabled.

 

CKEditor also has a mode whereas the main file isn't downloaded until actually required. The site downloads a small 2KB version initially, and the full 80+KB version later when the CKEditor is invoked. Not sure if that would work for your site, but it's something to look into:

 

http://ckeditor.com/blog/CKEditor-Loading-performance-details

 

Jordan

Edited January 3, 2014 by Laugh10704