As most of you might have noticed, there has been a few changes to the website. Little over a week ago, I upgraded the web hosting service to run on a Nginx server configured and optimized for Redis instead of the usual Unix with Apache 2.4. This new configuration is one of the best solutions for caching and delivering websites at lightning speeds, decreasing latency and load times for the end user.
While some things did improve, there were still some problems with how the website’s CSS and JS (WordPress, the theme, and other plugins) were minified, aggregated and loaded, as some of them needed to be loaded before the page could be painted (rendered on your screen.) After speaking with the web hosting support, we’ve made some tweaks using the ‘Autoptimize’ plugin and WP-Optimize. I’ve also removed and transferred the shop (WooCommerce) from the website to a separate installation on the subdomain ‘shop.bartoll.se.’ It’s very bare-boned at the moment, but I’ll work on it when I have more time.
Also, I’ve temporarily removed the ‘popular posts’ showing the top-5 articles from the last 24 hours from the front page. To see what articles that are currently the most popular, simply follow the ‘trending’ link in the navigation menus. It’s a fun way to find new content if you’re not a daily visitor.
From these changes, the initial ‘world-average-scenario’ server response-time has decreased from a very bad 1.5 to 2 seconds to below 800ms. Also, the first content paint now occurs within 2 to 3 seconds for those outside of Europe or on a bad connection, instead of the former 5 to 6 seconds. If you’re in northern Europe, close to our servers, or have a lightning-fast connection, the website should load completely within a second or two.
Looking at Google’s Page Speed Insights, the website score 96 out of 100 in performance for desktop users, while scoring much lower, around 50, for mobile devices. The score for best practices is a 100 out of 100. Still, there is room for improvement, especially on mobile devices.
If you read this and happen to work with, or have great experience with Ngix, Redis, and WordPress load and cache optimization, please feel free to contact me on Facebook and perhaps we can exchange services.
Again, if you enjoy my writing and the contents of my website, please consider donating, join our community at Ungovernable.se, or hire me for my services to help keep it up and running without any kind of advertisements or similar clutter. There are currently 1,291 articles online and I write one new article every morning all for free (and I still have old articles to add.) Also, I will continue to improve the website and add more ‘quick-start’ guides, making it easier to find and explore different topics.
