I recently made some tweaks that seem to really bump up website performance.
By adding some “preload” statements and a fragment cache, the front page on the “master” branch is getting webpagetest.org median performance figures of load time 0.730s, start render 0.567s. That’s with a fast Internet connection assuming
the site is all-the-way-up, but that’s also from a cold start (“never-seen-site before”). Once a user visits the site at all, much of the “big stuff” (like CSS and JavaScript) is cached, which makes performance even better. Details here:
The site doesn’t need to be blazingly fast, we just don’t want people to turn away because of interminable page loads. I think ideal is under 1s, and we must be under 2s response in such conditions. We’re easily meeting those requirements.
In the longer term I intend to replace the font-awesome font icon file, which is huge & doesn’t play nicely with dyslexic fonts, with loading specific SVGs (or maybe SVG sprites). That should reduce the cold start page load time even further.
