Usually, we just measure the performance of our customer’s applications and talk about it, but from time to time we have to set an example ourselves.
In the last couple of weeks, we increasingly felt that our blog isn’t loading fast enough to deliver a satisfying experience. You know that when you can feel it, it might be too late already. Additionally, SEO is about content and performance and our blog is an important marketing tool for us.
That’s why we went on a quest for improving the performance of our company’s WordPress-based blog. Our motto: “Don’t just complain about the lack of performance, do something about it!”
Step 0 – Measuring
Measuring is believing and so we started with this WebPageTest result. As you can see, the initial performance is bad, a lot of content is not properly cached, and rendering started after 2.6 sec. Time for some serious tuning.
Step 1 – Reading
Tuning requires you to know what to tune. Thus, we read the famous Best Practises for Speeding Up Your Web Site by Yahoo. A similar article by Google can be found here. If you deal with web site performance in any way, you should read this. We consider it mandatory for performance and web testers.