When it comes to designing and developing a web site the load time is one consideration that is often ignored, or is an afterthought once the majority of the design and structure is in place.  While high-speed internet connections are becoming increasingly common there are still a significant portion of web users out there with 56k connections, and even those with broadband connections aren't guaranteed to have a fast connection to your particular server.  Every second that a user has to wait to download your content is increasing the chance of that user deciding to move on.

Attempting to reduce the size of a web page is usually restricted to compressing larger images and optimizing them for web use.  This is a necessary step to managing page size, but there is another important factor that can significantly reduce the size of a page to improve download times.  Getting rid of that code bloat means less actual bytes to be downloaded by clients, as well as captilizing on what the client has already downloaded.  Unfortunately this is an option that tends to be ignored due to the perceived loss of time spent combing through markup to cut out the chaff, despite the fact that clean, efficient markup with well-planned style definitions will save countless hours when it comes to upkeep and maintenance.

To demonstrate the difference between a bloated page and one with efficient markup I created two basic pages. One uses tables, font tags, HTML style attributes and so forth to control the structure and look of the page, while the other uses minimal markup with an external stylesheet.

1) Bloated Page

2) Cleaned Page

Even in this basic example you can see a fairly dramatic improvement when the excess HTML is trimmed and CSS is used to control style.  The original page is 51 lines, where the cleaned page is only 26 lines, plus 7 lines in the style sheet.  The cleaned page is a third the size of the original (counting the style sheet), and more realistically is actually half the size because the style sheet would be cached by most client browsers and wouldn't be downloaded for every page request.  As far as raw kilobytes it's a difference of 6KB to 4KB, which isn't a particularly exciting difference in this case, but one that is quickly magnified as the length of the page increases.  This is especially true with dynamic applications that pull content from a database, most importantly content such as product listings that utilize the same markup and are repeated multiple times. Fortunately in the case of dynamic pages involving looping procedures that output the same markup with different content, cutting down the bloat can be as easy as a few modifications to those procedures.

Furthermore if you wanted to change, for instance, the font color or the line-height in the original, you would have to modify every font tag and table cell to accomplish that.  Implementing those changes in the second example requires a single modification to the style-sheet.  The time-saved here is once again significantly amplified when considered in a situation with multiple pages (in many cases this can be hundreds or even thousands).

When all is said and done, this isn't meant to be a be-all end-all guide for optimizing your markup because I could write a book and still not cover it all.  Rather it was meant to highlight an aspect of web page performance and optimization that is usually swept under the rug in favour of those that are more directly appreciable such as eye-candy and new features.  While clean markup might not be as "glamourous" as other aspects of web development, it is an important aspect to keeping load time in check and a crucial factor in reducing them amount of time spent maintaining and updating.