Comments on: Saving Bandwidth and Improving Site Speed Using CSS Sprites

By: Joanne

Joanne — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:41:08 +0000

Sprites are a great technique for saving bandwidth (check out Amazon’s use of them), but also a complete pain in the backside if changes are ever needed. If you’re not expecting high traffic, it’s much easier to use the normal img route, and restrict sprites to such parts as the navigation.

By: Ian Harte

Ian Harte — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:11:44 +0000

This is very interesting, deffo going to look into this in more detail! Not got time on a monday morning though haha! Gonna have to have a look sometime in week thanks for opening my eyes to this though.

By: Izdelava strani

Izdelava strani — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:44:21 +0000

Although I agree with positive effects that sprites have, I also think that sprites can make your markup a living hell to maintain.

By: Hiren Khambhayta

Hiren Khambhayta — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:02:07 +0000

Thanks for the tutorial, I have used this technique in my website and boosted my site opening speed by about 200% it was loading before in 7 seconds but now it loads in just 3 seconds.

By: camasuvi

camasuvi — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:10:38 +0000

It’s very odd to worry about opera 6 in this century :)

By: Luis Herrero

Luis Herrero — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:31:04 +0000

Hi again

I’ve made an app for sprite creation this weekend. It’s quite simple and want to add some features. You can check it out at http://www.luisherrero.es/lab/sprite-generator/

Hope you guys find it useful!!

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:36:14 +0000

By: Peter Richards

Peter Richards — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:16:03 +0000

I agree with you and enjoyed reading your post of when a CSS sprite should and should not be used. I would never advocate using sprites for larger images that naturally need the ‘img’ tag and ‘alt’ element to carry the primary keyphrase. But from my professional point of view, I am obligated to maximise the efficiency delivered to both users and search spiders.

By: Matthew Pennell

Matthew Pennell — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:19:07 +0000

Before you start converting every single image on your site into one enormous CSS sprite, it’s worth considering the downside of combining images – memory usage by your browser in uncompressing the sprite image.

See here for more details: http://blog.vlad1.com/2009/06/22/to-sprite-or-not-to-sprite/

By: Jacob Gube

Jacob Gube — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:43:16 +0000

@John Faulds: I'm familiar with Thierry Image Placement, but as part of my "Does It Really Matter?" Philosophy on web development, I consciously choose text-indent. Users browsing this site with images disabled account for a small set of readers and as a normal-sighted user, you'd miss out on many things, and in turn, would lead to a poorer experience. You might see a flaw in this argument ("What about mobile users with text-only browsers?") -- we have an alternate version of Six Revisions just for mobile device users.