If you are optimizing a website for speed, one of the major changes that I would recommend is combining images into sprites. Not all of them, of course. I usually convert small images that are called very frequently such as images used in navigation menus, images and header, footer or side bar (social media icons, for instance), dividers, link buttons etc. This saves precious HTML requests backs to the server.
There are a number of sprite generators like Sprite Cow. Today’s feature sprite generator is Spritemapper. This simple but effective tool merges multiple images into one and generates CSS positioning for the corresponding slices.
Spritemapper ensures that the images are packed tightly – the result is crisp and light image sprite. The tool, itself, is a simple command-line program powered by a Python library including its own PNG and CSS parser.
