Faster and Better
by Roger on Nov.08, 2009, under Web Performance
As I took the time to get the blog back up and running I remembered how slow it was. Considering I make my living by telling people that performance matters and consult with them on how to improve their site’s performance I thought this a bit embarrassing.
Of course I’d known for a long time that this blog was slow and heavy but never had dedicated the time to improving it because I was too busy helping others improve theirs.
This past week I made some changes to make the site faster. The first thing I did was to move the videos off to Vimeo instead of hosting them on our site. I did the same thing with our pictures, all our new albums are on Picasa. By moving all this heavy content off the blog, the size of the pages was reduced and thus the response time dropped. The last change was actually the one that made the biggest difference. I installed a WordPress plug-in called “WP Super Cache” which makes static files from the dynamically created WordPress pages. My colleague Stephen Pierzchala actually measured the performance difference when he switched to using WP Super Cache.
The result is an average response time of about 2 seconds for the US and about 5 to 6 seconds in Europe and sadly 12 seconds in China. Not too concerned about that last one since I’m pretty sure we have no readers in China or anywhere in Asia for that matter.
My favorite part of all this is that our blog is now also available on your mobile phone.
