Tweaking website performance – Part 1 – Before

I know the new skin for my site is overdue but I am waiting for the next release of subtext so I can fine tune my skin to any changes made in the release. During this lapse I have been contributing to the project and I have also been adapting another nice theme that will be finished in the next couple of days.

This post is related to a previous post, ongoing maintenance where I talk about my sites YSlow score (33) :(.

ySlow report before 01/05/09

Using the FireFox plugin httpfox I loaded up my website and was fairly surprised by the following results: (note i have removed web/script resources and google stuff, total was 52)

Http request listing

Looking at the time total above 21.202. The list in full total was 30.441.  That’s some time considering everything is straightforward no fancy stuff nor is it image heavy.

What’s the plan?

  1. Remove any redundant tags.
  2. Check images have been compressed properly and are right size.
  3. Reduce number of javascript files.
  4. Reduce number of css files.
  5. Use CSS sprites where possible.
  6. Removed unused javascript/css and compress.
  7. Add static site files to a CDN.

All the above is pretty straightforward but I’ll need to investigate how to reduce the core files related to subtext and possibly suggest these changes in a future release.

I plan on using Google App Engine for my personal CDN. I’ll put up a blog post on how simple it is to get setup and running.

Let the fun begin……..

 

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