Speed up load times

I have noticed that when I load the homepage fresh (ie no cache) the area to the top left with the title and the various links takes a while to load.I presume this is due to the large number and size of the images in that area.

In order to alleviate that problem I have a small suggestion. It’s not much but I feel it may help speed load times just a tad. If you were to take the title graphic as an example, at time of writing it is a .gif weighing in at 3.42KB. Simply by converting that graphic to .png it goes down to 2.57KB.

That around a 25% saving just by changing formats.

Here’s the link to the converted .png http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/1839/kongtk3.png

It is also worth mentioning I used optipng to convert the file since that will offer some lossless compression too.

It could also be edited to remove the slight bit of red at the top which is redundant.

It doesn’t really matter much because after loading it the first time the image is cached… I think most of the loading time comes from the Leaderboard – jmbt02’s avatar alone is almost 27kb. Anyways, most of the games are much larger in comparison… (I don’t actually think the site is slow..)

Although Alexa does say this – Speed: Very Slow (85% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 5.0 Seconds