Coming into the end of week 3 of Ariel's PR contest. Good news is that most of the tasks this week I had already implemented:
- Add your pitch to your homepage – DONE!
- Your site must load in less than3.5 seconds – See below…
- No Flash Intros – DONE!
- Have a Consistent Look and Feel Throughout the Net – DONE!
- Give Away an exclusive MP3 – DONE!
So – does BenSommer.com load in less than 3.5 seconds????
Yes!!! Luckily I didn't have to do anything to the site to make this happen. I run the site on WordPress, which can help or hinder you when it comes to optimizing – there are so many cool, bandwidth-sucking plugins you can enable for WordPress that its easy to overload your site with needless web doodads. That – combined with an image-heavy page design – would easily put a WordPress-run site over 3.5 seconds load time.
But I made a conscious choice early on to do a few things:
No flash!
Or as little as possible. These days you have to use a little flash for the really cool audio widgets (e.g. ReverbNations‘, which I use)
No images for links!
Use text links dude, not images!
Minimize javascript!
Plenty of javascript on the site but I take some tricky angles to minimize the impact of all that extra text a user's browser has to download, including including the actual javascript in the actual web page – vs. linking to an external .js file. Its easy enough to do when you're using WordPress themes to style your site.
Use caching!
An awesome feature of WordPress is a plugin called Super Cache which will translate all your pages & posts – which are normally just shells that require actually PHP programming code and database lookups to generate – into static snapshots of that data. This speeds things up considerably, as well as guarding against the “slashdot effect” – that unfortunate side-effect of the most fortunate thing that could happen to a lesser-known site.
So how fast did my site load? See here for yourself, but I measured a series of loads and the average time was 1.32 seconds!
