In reply to Jack Lenox.

Actual an Reply to Jason: And how big is the HOME page of that "biggest" site?

I've just had "fun" with a (one page) site of a client which loads a lot of BIG images, a full screen (100% width AND height) slideshow plus a really nasty panorama view thingy which tends to start to turn in circles when the mouse cursor is out of focus.

At the current time, I managed to get the size of the panorama view from 7 MB down to 4,1 MB, implement lazy loading so it doesnt load instantly (and block the whole site loading cycle), plus reduce the overal image file size by approx 40 - 50%. Still, this thing takes at least 15 - 20 seconds to load .. which is also thanks to its theme, which is of corpse a premium one, where folks do not need to follow the very strict rules of the WP.org theme directory. Thus more intense optimization is being canceled out by the "not being able to update it properly afterward" elephant. or pink rhino, pot wale or $insert_favorite_big_animal. Eg. it does not behave well together with caching plugins, eg. Hyper Cache or W3 Total Cache (I tried quite a few ones), Lazyloading options are reduced to a minimum, and so on.

With a theme that was sticking to at least a few rules and techniques shown on Jack Lenox' site, the amount of work I'd have to put into the optimization would have been considerably less. Maybe there wouldnt have been even any concern to act ..

cu, w0lf.