One of the optimizations (if you want to call it that) that can be done for decreased load-time on a web page, is removing excess white space. In many of our pages at iBegin this saved as much as 100kb. While not every site has some of the 300kb pages that we have, it can still add up very quickly.

Django by default provides a {% spaceless %} tag in your templates which will allow you to achieve this effect, but we don’t use Django’s template engine (Hooray, Jinja!). The tag approach also seemed fairly inappropriate, as we just want to do it across the entire site, no matter what. Instead, we moved it into a middleware, which simply strips all whitespace (using the same method as the built-in tag) from any HTML page.

While this makes some pages unreadable, the time it saves downloading the page for the average user (See Steve Souders’ tips) is well worth the trouble it causes a few people.

# Aliasing it for the sake of page size.
from django.utils.html import strip_spaces_between_tags as short
 
class SpacelessMiddleware(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if 'text/html' in response['Content-Type']:
            response.content = short(response.content)
        return response

Note, that if you use page caching middleware, placing this in the appropriate place will also allow you to save space in your cache.

Enjoy!