Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

19.2. Limiting the Page Payload

One issue that always arises in regard to SharePoint 3.0 sites with respect to performance is the size of the complete payload for a requested page. The payload of a page is the combined size of all of the files needed for the page to be rendered and perform as desired. This includes not only the HTML of the page, but any referenced style sheets, images, media, and client-side script. Before looking at any of the options, understand that a Publishing site, or any SharePoint 3.0 site for that matter, can be completely customized to look like anything using master pages and CSS. Sure, SharePoint's OOTB layout is HTML table-based, rather than a more concise CSS-based design, but that does not mean a SharePoint site has to be table-based — that is just how it shipped. Developers and designers can create a completely customized SharePoint design and implementation with a small page size.

Regardless, there are some SharePoint infrastructure files that contribute quite a bit to the SharePoint page size. This section covers a few techniques developers can implement to reduce the payload of the page. For demonstration purposes, an OOTB site created using the Publishing Portal template is used. The only modification that has been made to the site is to configure it for anonymous access; no other content or branding changes have been made.

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