Update: I’ve disabled a few plugins (you’ll probably never miss them); I’m not sure which was slowing things down so much, but since doing so, the site loads 2-4 times faster for me, according to my page load timer. That’s a definite plus, but it isn’t a bandwidth savings and I’d still like to trim the fat in that area a little bit, to help out my visitors still afflicted with dial-up Internet (hi, Dad!).
I’ve considered doing this for quite some time, and if I don’t do it soon, it’s going to drive me crazy.
Fairly recently, I became aware of Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site; these best practices comprise 14 guidelines which, if followed, ought to provide an optimum experience for users of a website.
Using Yahoo!’s YSlow, I’ve been shown that currently RickBeckman.org is far from adhering to Yahoo!’s guidelines. Indeed, on only four of the guidelines does YSlow award the site with A grades; on two it gets Cs, two are not applicable (apparently), and on six the gets Fs.
So over the course of the next few days (though the process could take longer), I’m going to be refactoring things around here. If you read this site via the syndication feed, you shouldn’t notice too much (and thanks for subscribing — you rock!); if, however, you visit the site to read it, you’ll likely notice all sorts of changes.
It’s going to be interesting to see if there are any noticeable improvements in the site’s performance throughout the process; I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Fasterfox’s page load timer throughout my experiments!
Edit to add: Actually, it may be a few days before any big changes are noticed at all; I’m going to set up a dummy blog to try out my ideas for optimizing this site, and once everything is working beautifully there, I’ll transfer the code over. Until then, sit tight!
[edit to add] Progress thus far: New style chosen, perfect “A” record in YSlow achieved (for all applicable points), and numerous style tweaks made. Stay tuned!
