How to speed up this sites loading

2ax

I can see that hjb has a point. The header logo, that star on the top right, and the menu bars on the left take up over 120k between them. But I have assumed in the past that these images, once in the cache, are not downloaded again for each new page view - perhaps someone would confirm this.

Mr_Skint_2

Thats correct they stay in the cache, but the
default of browsers is to look for updated versions anyway.

2ax

... and then there are people who haven't visited for a while, or who clean the whole cache each day ..... maybe those images could be compressed as suggested - switched to jpg perhaps?

hjb_2

The new menu is actually one image. An image map is then used to 'split' it into the different options from Credit Cards to Chat forum.
The image is 8.8kb (not very big) but could have been made with div's, background colours, text and one image (the arrow). That would have probably halved it again.

2ax

hjb wrote:

The new menu is actually one image. An image map is then used to 'split' it into the different options from Credit Cards to Chat forum.
The image is 8.8kb (not very big) but could have been made with div's, background colours, text and one image (the arrow). That would have probably halved it again.

I've got it as 49459 bytes, the logo-r is 55598, and the star 13192 - logo-l is the only jpg (4264 bytes) - do I need to refresh?