I'm trying to optimize my website's load time because it was too long, and it still is but especially for the jQuery UI CSS images,
If you have a minute, could you please look at this Pingdom test?
Among files number 60 and 75 there are few images from the jQuery CSS file (just renamed the path). They take up to 3 seconds to connect, and then they seem to load fast.. But 3 seconds to connect?
The piece of CSS related to this:
.ui-icon { width: 16px; height: 16px; background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_222222_256x240.png); }
.ui-widget-content .ui-icon {background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_222222_256x240.png); }
.ui-widget-header .ui-icon {background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_222222_256x240.png); }
.ui-state-default .ui-icon { background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_888888_256x240.png); }
.ui-state-hover .ui-icon, .ui-state-focus .ui-icon {background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_454545_256x240.png); }
.ui-state-active .ui-icon {background-image: url(/css/images/ui-icons_454545_256x240.png); }
And the path of this CSS file is: /CSS/ui.css
and the images path is: /CSS/images/*.png
If this is not about paths, I am completely lost here, any clue?
The other thing to think about is that your browser uses caching. So, when you run a test like this it will look like JQuery UI images are horribly slow. But to the user (with a proper browser caching setup in place) the "penalty" will only happen once. So, in reality it's not an entirely fair test.
I'd worry more about your 40kb background image and less-than-perfectly-optimized CSS. Try this website on your css document to drop 13% of it's overhead (on the main site css) Also, you could benefit by combining the CSS documents together, which will lower HTTP overhead. Again, thanks to the concept of browser caching this would be a one-time only improvement for a properly setup browser.
Compared to many sites out there, this one loads quite quick. Unless your site is going out to 20+million daily, or you're paying by the kb for bandwidth, the setup is more than adequate.