How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

That 916 word article takes over 4.2MB to download. Over 1MB dedicated to some js file and nearly 1MB to a JSON file [1] containing indexes, the output of which I can't see in use on the page.

1. https://www.netlify.com/js/lunr/PagesIndex.json

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#5

Post by topaz0 » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

I'm not impressed if you're making me download 4MB to see the 5kB of text in this blog post.

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#6

Post by Kluny » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

They have a website speed test that they want you to try. That's the whole point of the post, but you have to read to the bottom to figure that out. I tried the speed test. After 6 minutes of "connecting to Sao Paolo" I lost interest.

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#7

Post by dsp1234 » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #3

Surprising result: news.ycombinator.com scored 0 out of a possible 100 points. https://testmysite.io/58a4993871e20a1fdab44dee/news.ycombina... -- edit - looks like time to first byte is what really kills scores

There is a 301 redirect from http://news.ycombinator.com to https://news.ycombinator.com.

On a fresh VM, I get a TTFB on http://news.ycombinator.com of about 200ms, then another 200ms to retrieve https://news.ycombinator.com. So maybe it's counting the TTFB of the final document.

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#8

Post by supervill » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

Lol you have to download a huge file first, so it only works IF you site is already very large

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#9

Post by 00deadbeef » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:40 PM UTC

I ran the test about ten times and it only completed once.

The TTFB score it gives is the average score from around the world. Do I need to care that somebody in Brazil has to wait a whopping 219ms to see my English language entirely UK-centric content? I don't feel this average TTFB is therefore very useful when my target audience will get my full HTML in less than 14ms as measured by this tool (this is actually the score from Germany as for some reason the site tests from London but doesn't display it in the results table).

I also disagree that "slow and expensive legacy dynamic" PHP sites are necessarily slow. My personal site built in Slim 3 executes in less than 10ms, thank you. The only optimisation I did was turning on opcache. You'd be surprised how fast PHP 7 actually is. If I wanted I could turn on nginx's caching and serve up thousands of requests per second.

Finally, this article doesn't explain how to shave off 73% of my load time without using Netlify, despite the author's claims that his "goal with this post [wasn't] to get you to use Netlify".

[Edit]

Their servers seem to be struggling with the tests. My site is now scoring over 1000ms which is not possible.

Re: How to Shave 73% Off of Your Load Time (It’s Really, Really Easy)

#10

Post by slantyyz » Wed, Feb 15, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

dsp1234 wrote: post #7

slantyyz wrote: post #3

Surprising result: news.ycombinator.com scored 0 out of a possible 100 points. https://testmysite.io/58a4993871e20a1fdab44dee/news.ycombina... -- edit - looks like time to first byte is what really kills scores

There is a 301 redirect from http://news.ycombinator.com to https://news.ycombinator.com . On a fresh VM, I get a TTFB on http://news.ycombinator.com of about 200ms, then another 200ms to retrieve https://news.ycombinator.com . So maybe it's counting the TTFB of the final document.

As the speed test is going down its list of tests while you wait, you do see an "https" check - so I don't know if that 301 has any impact. I do notice that reloading the test yields varying results. I got as high as 11/100.

The dumb thing with the "Share your results" link is that that it appears to rerun the test instead of showing you a snapshot of the result from that test (so I guess it's not really sharing results, is it?).