24 Replies to “How’s the speed?”

  1. Chrome is loading faster than Firefox. Generally, not much difference noticed though, compare to previous theme.

  6. The old theme showed the number of replies on the main page… I somewhat miss that

  9. By chance I am on a slow connection this weekend. Even so, the page seemed to load as quickly as ever.

  10. there is a little lag with lynx but in gerneral it’s fine.

  13. Hi Justin

    Looks fantastic.

    And to backup your hard work, GTmetrix reports this site now loads in just 3 seconds (previous 4 sec with this new theme and 10 seconds with old theme).

    And page size dropped down to 190kb (down from 400kb)

    https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.dragonflydigest.com/3jJE46J1

    You’re also now getting an “A” rating.

    Only last thing that would be interesting to see is if SuperCache helps any more (though it’s obviously WAAAY improved already).

    Site looks awesome.

    Love your hard work on this site and amazing daily content.

  15. People use different devices to view a site, but for me the added whitespace around things forces me to scroll more and lose focus of more surrounding comments than before.

  16. And a little less glarish white would improve ergonomics.

  18. Justin, any reason why this theme has 7 different JS includes and 6 different CSS files?

    Instead of the browser ***blocking*** on fetching each JS file, those 7 JS files should be merged into a single file.

    Same for the 6 CSS files

  19. Looking at the online reports, the incremental time of downloading multiple javascript files is less than the time for downloading the base HTML and image for the page itself. Also, if I merge those files together, I lose the ability to automatically upgrade this WordPress install. Based on that, there’s no reason to change those files.

  20. Justin, maybe you’re not aware but JavaScript blocks rendering / load time of a web site. So consolidating JavaScript can make a huge improve,ent.

    Also, it seems weird to me that this blog even has any JavaScript in use. It’d be worth investigating if the JavaScript is even needed.

  21. Justin, more info on blocking JavaScript

    https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/BlockingJS

    Quote : “You should avoid and minimize the use of blocking JavaScript, especially external scripts that must be fetched before they can be executed. Scripts that are necessary to render page content can be inlined to avoid extra network requests, however the inlined content needs to be small and must execute quickly to deliver good performance”

  22. Having to fetch Javascript files takes time, I agree. That is a fact that is correct.

    I’m looking at the same report you’re reading this advice from, and it shows the javascript files downloading in less time than the overall page data. These files show up as part of this theme – if I consolidate them, I’m going to have to reconsolidate them on every update of the theme.

    This looks like extra maintenance work now, and in the future, for no noticeable gain. I’d rather spend my time on changing the layout.

  23. Re: changing themes.

    You might want to look at the theme called “Frank”.

    http://somerandomdude.com/work/frank/

    Frank is bare bones – no Javascript frameworks or unnecessary images, just a simple, fast blogging theme

    It only takes 2 requests to load and is only 9kb in page size.

  24. Justin – if you use the Fastest Cache plugin. It will COMBINE the JavaScript for you automatically. So you don’t have to worry about upgrading your blog theme over time.

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