Reduce front page size and loading times

[andmor-]

Currently the full front page is 12.5MB and takes ~7 seconds to read on a high speed broadband connection. When throttled to simulate a fast 3G connection, the loading time jumps to >50 seconds.

For comparison, our current production website is 1.48MB and takes about 1 second to load using a broadband connection and ~6 seconds on a 3G connection.

(the times are measured without client side cache)

We need to improve this, as we want our front page to load and become responsive as fast as possible. We think this is very important for the user experience. By now it is also unclear what would be an acceptable value, but in this ticket we should track the actions we take to tackle the problem.

To start, we can partially mitigate this by letting Drupal auto generate and serve smaller versions of content images like this one). Though this can potentially have a visual impact on large screens.

[andmor-]

Some important improvements affecting all landing page content type pages in 21bc7fc