Also see Part I. Tools and techniques to optimize and improve speed of responsive web sites.
Building off of my previous post on RWD Bloat, the following is step-by-step how I made my site faster over the course of a few days. For the purposes of this test, I’m hyper-focused on my Speed Index numbers for my Home and Article templates (the 2 most visited templates of my site).
I’ve nearly doubled the speed of my site. Not too shabby for a responsive design with jQuery, two webfonts, third-party ad, third-party comments, all while being tested on a 3G Connection. My Speed Index on Cable is currently 400~414 for both templates.
Hopefully that helps underline the point, as Scott Jehl so eloquently puts it , “How we load assets matters just as much as how many assets we’re loading.”