Reduce page loading time by:
Icon\sprites, loaded from a single image asset.
These icon are 40px square, all within this single .svg file, loaded as a data URI to further improve performance
Try these: There should be no delay for selecting, hovering etc because the image file is already loaded and the area to be displayed is by changing background-position in css.
This biggly image (not too biggly, its just a demo) loaded as background into DIVs
These are loaded in CSS as data URI, so there should be no delay in loading.