Streamlined Asset Serving

Aaron Gustafson of Easy! Designs posted how they handle serving up multiple asset files (CSS, javascript) in the most efficient way possible. They are particular about organizing their CSS and javascript into multiple templates but serving that up as a dozen individual files isn’t very efficient.

A while back, it was not uncommon for us to include each of these assets into the document separately, but, as website optimization and performance folks will tell you, all of that separation leads to a lot of additional overhead because the browser must request each of those files individually. In the interest of streamlining the download process, we decided to merge all of the stylesheets together at the template level before sending them over the wire.

I keep all of the assets of sites I build outside of EE templates, but I really like this way of leveraging EE templates. It’s almost slick enough for me to rethink my ways.

Read the whole article: Template-based Asset Munging in ExpressionEngine