Recommended next steps

Let me strongly recommend at least one additional step you'll need to take before taking a project like this to production. It's imperative that you take time to optimize your images, CSS, and JavaScript. These steps are not difficult:

• Compressing images takes just a bit of time, and it addresses the single largest cause for large page footprints. I've already used the save to web process option of Photoshop, but chances are you can squeeze a few more bytes out. In Chapter 2, Creating Your Own Build Process with Gulp, you can see how to add an image compress task to your gulp build process.

• In addition, we badly need to remove unneeded Bootstrap Sass files from the import sequence in the scss/includes/_bootstrap.scss file, and then compress the resulting main.css file.

• Finally, we need to slim down our plugins.js file by replacing Bootstrap's all-inclusive bootstrap.min.js file with compressed versions of only the three plugins that we're actually using: carousel.js,...