Los Angeles -- In a rare attempt to keep pace with technological advancement, popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter today revealed that its Web site is getting new enhancements equipped toward being “optimized for speed.” Besides getting rid of the hashbang (#!) in URLs, the social network is also focusing on reducing the “time to first Tweet” and ensuring only what is necessary will load with each Web page.

Twitter's engineering team has just posted up a missive on its blog that goes over a bunch of back-end changes it has made, with the aim of improving the experience for end users.

Essentially, one of the biggest catalysts in this improvement among those are abolishing the much reviled 'hashbangs' -- the #! symbols you used to see in single-tweet urls.

According to Twitter, the latest revamp it is enforcing allowed the company to drop page load times to 20 percent of what they were previously -- a pretty significant improvement.

“To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we have been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server,” Twitter engineering manager Dan Webb wrote in a blog post. “This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.”

Amazingly, now by just getting rid of the hashbang from the URL means only the browser has to download the full page and render it on a client basis along with any Javascript. This ends up causing a slight delay any time you visit a URL, one that could be eliminated by having the server render the page and give it to you directly.

However, as Twitter explained, the old URL structure was pretty complicated: “the browser needs to download an HTML page, download and execute some JavaScript, recognize the hashbang path (which is only visible to the browser), then fetch and render the content for that URL.”

In fact, this lengthy process was especially irritating on Tweet permalink pages, when you are coming in from outside the site to look at a single tweet, then having to wait for the page to load and render. Twitter says that removing the need for the client to handle the rendering has improved the speed of any content formerly at hashbanged urls. Currently, Twitter's main streams still use hashbangs in their URLs.

As a matter of fact, all of these changes are currently rolling out, and unlike the sometimes-controversial redesigns that Twitter has undergone over the years, there is no doubt users will appreciated a faster-loading Twitter site. For more information about how Twitter has been speeding up the process of navigating Twitter.com, you can check out the full engineering post here.