(c) Sean Bordner
Let’s face it, SharePoint 2010 pages are pretty heavy and could stand to lose a few KB’s in order to really fly! I just stood up a blank publishing site and then using IE saved it to my HD. Although this doesn’t take into account compression schemes, this test gave me a rough idea of what we’re dealing with. The .htm file itself (not including images, .js, .css, etc..) weighed in at 99K. Now take into account the .css files (around 6 of them), the .js files (another 6 files), and of course those snappy images…
A page’s overall download size not only affects the users experience in regard to performance, but can also prevent the page from being crawled by the major search engines; which innocently have better things to be doing then spending all day crawling your overweight pages. Over the course of my next few posts, I’m going to walk through some tips on reducing the download size of your SharePoint 2010 pages.
Tip: Determine the size of the SharePoint page. The easiest way is to save the page and its contents locally (I use IE and then save as .htm). Then I just go to where I saved it on my HD and view properties of the many files used to make up the page. This gives me a pretty good idea of the total download size. Once upon a time the “ideal weight” was around 40K. Well that was then and it’s clearly not going to happen now, however we should strive to keep our page weight as low as possible.
Sean Bordner
