The image of the coffee cup (the only one I can bring up) is only 46kb. That loads pretty quick.

What a brave new world we live in, when the words "only" and "46kb" are mentioned next to each other in a positive way when talking about the web.

Am I the only one who balks at including a 5kb JS file, even if I need it? At least, with automatic media managers that merge everything into one file, I don't have to worry about the extra requests as much.

Yep. I don't really see the problem if your market is B2B in the US or Western Europe. Those shopping for their business at work, ought to be using high speed connections (albeit ones that may or may not be saturated by fellow workers).

If your market is developed Asia, then most cellphones have better internet speeds equal to Australian broadband, so that extra 5kb is a rounding error in transmission time.

The lunchtime variant loaded almost instantly for me here (on a relatively slow iPad 1).

On my home cable connection they load in < 1 second.

The lunch image loads almost instantly for me as well... only 67k. Someone seems to have taken some time to tweak the compression of the images to maintain very good quality.

Strange - we really optimized the code base and images, hosted on content delivery network etc - should be darn quick.

But a very good illustration of why web page load speed is probably the FIRST and simplest area to optimize - check this for a primer ye who be concerned of their conversions:

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/06/15/everything-you...