Got LowISO to load in under 500ms!

[Techie]

I've been working on optimizing the server processes, minifying content, compressing images, and removing unneeded queries from LowISO to try to get it as responsive as possible, and today I got the site to the point where under a good internet connection in the US, the homepage and all its elements can download and render for a guest visitor in under 500ms! (And that's without having anything cached in the visitor's browser!



This is a test through Pingdom Tools if you're interested in testing your site.

Even though the number 500 isn't actually significant for anything (500ms probably won't be noticeably different from 550ms) I feel like it's a good milestone and it feels great to accomplish!

I'll work on other optimizations as I find opportunities in the future, and I'll be extra careful that a new add-on doesn't slow down the site. I'd recommend that all site owners do the same!

 

[Jake]

Good work, it did take a little while for me though.
If you're serious about speed, get a CDN.

And before you say it's because my internet is slow:

 

[Techie]

Good work, it did take a little while for me though.
If you're serious about speed, get a CDN.

And before you say it's because my internet is slow:

I think the biggest slowdown is the time-to-first-byte from my webhost. I'm using CloudFlare as a form of CDN right now, but do you have suggestions for a cheap (for a small site) yet quality pull-CDN for images?

I used to use MaxCDN back in the day, and I've used Amazon's cloud before (I found that if you're under a few cents a month they don't bull you for that month).

 

[Jake]

I would recommend MaxCDN, what stopped you from using them?

(Note: I'm not saying the site is slow, it just didn't load (for me) in 500MS. Maybe 1.5 seconds. Very fast, still, but not as fast as this says.)

 

[Techie]

I love Pingdom because it helps me find the biggest bottlenecks. There's another site where you choose "A DSL user in Texas" and it shows you the more realistic load times and waterfalls.

MaxCDN's tiers are too high for me, I only need maybe 50MB per month.

 

[Jake]

Check these out: http://www.fromdev.com/2011/06/content- ... ative.html

 

[Luke]

For me your site took 5.01 seconds to load. You can view a network analysis of your site loading in Firefox below. You can see in the bottom right corner how large your site is (in KB) and the time it took to load.

🙂

 

[iPhonefreak]

For me your site took 5.01 seconds to load. You can view a network analysis of your site loading in Firefox below. You can see in the bottom right corner how large your site is (in KB) and the time it took to load.

🙂

Your internet is so slow, though!!

Spoiler

I am kidding with you. 😀

 

[Techie]

For me your site took 5.01 seconds to load. You can view a network analysis of your site loading in Firefox below. You can see in the bottom right corner how large your site is (in KB) and the time it took to load.

🙂

Haha those pesky Facebook and Google Analytics codes adding three seconds after everything else has been done 😀

I think my next project will be getting the site to begin rendering faster and then loading the JS at the end; right now the JS at the beginning has to load before the site can even begin to render in the browser. It'll load in the same amount of time but it'll feel faster to users.

 

[Jake]

Looks like all those taking time to load are things a CDN could handle, if you can fork the cash 😛

 

[Techie]

Looks like all those taking time to load are things a CDN could handle, if you can fork the cash 😛

CloudFlare delivers my images and CSS files over their CDN network. All of those elements load fast right now when I look at any speed tests.

The only problems left are to see if I can move the javascript down on the page so that elements can start loading faster, and to see if I can get my server that delivers the pages to process the PHP faster and deliver that initial page faster.

 

[Jake]

add "async" to your script tag if the js doesn't need to load before the html