1. Read the source of your own web pages. What's really necessary?
2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?
3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.
4. Stuff that's not going to change, including most icons, should have long cache expiration times so they don't get reloaded.
5. Look at your content management system. Is it generating a unique page of CSS for each content page? If so, why? Is it generating boilerplate CSS or Javascript over and over again?
6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.
> 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?
Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them.
> 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.
Yes they do, because tracking.
> 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.
5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.
1. Read the source of your own web pages. What's really necessary?
2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?
3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.
4. Stuff that's not going to change, including most icons, should have long cache expiration times so they don't get reloaded.
5. Look at your content management system. Is it generating a unique page of CSS for each content page? If so, why? Is it generating boilerplate CSS or Javascript over and over again?
6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.
7. You can probably remove the IE6 support now.