Huge amount of empty space, and YSlow
 

Ever look at your source code? I've noticed for a while now that there is a tremendous amount of empty white space in my Wordpress pages. I don't know if it's the theme or just built in to Wordpress, but it bothers me. I've been doing HTML since Tim Berners-Lee was a pup, and I remember always hearing that it wasn't "proper" coding to leave lots of white space, because the browser actually has to "read" it as it renders the page. Makes sense, but I'm not sure if it matters anymore. That was in the days of dial-up (remember that, boys and girls?), and maybe it's not a significant problem now.

But I did look at my Google Analytics visitor data, and there are still some poor souls on dial-up accessing my site. Even DSL can be pretty slow, so I hate to make the site load any slower than necessary. And the code looks untidy to me. All the CSS at the top also bothers me, but I"m not sure I should remove that and call it separately

I also ran YSlow, and was told I'm running 11 external javascripts which should be combined. I don't know how to do that with Wordpress except run a plugin.

It also says I have 47 separate components that are not on CDN, whatever that is...

There are other areas where I got F or D grades, but they seem to be part of Wordpress, nothing I'm doing wrong.

The white space is caused by both Atahualpa and Wordpress. It is supposed to improve the readability of the code. The possible savings through no white space are very, very small, especially with a huge site like yours. CDN means content distribution network, it usually costs thousands of dollars and is used by sites like amazon.com

Ask your host to enable mod_deflate or gzip on your hosting account. (Actually, insist...)

That will cut the HTML of your homepage from 65 KByte to ~20KByte and do the same with all extra JS and CSS files (reduce size of all text based files to 20-25 %). Huuuge savings and it's easy for the host to do. It'll just cost a little bit of CPU resources but not much really.

It's not enabled on your host, I did not even think about that.

OK, thanks. I'll ask about mod_deflate or gzip.

I've noticed the white space issue on other sites, too. It doesn't make the code easier to read when you have to scroll many screens from one line to the next!

Have a couple of lines between different elements would be useful, I think.

Those behind YSlow has a Yahoo Group where people expand on settings and advice, some from experience. Like CDN not being that relevant to most users. Check the thread "How many "rules" are really necessary?" for example.

New Yslow 2.0b3 out btw. 10 times better than the old. You can make own rules now for example, dump CDN may be.