Site Performance Starting Point

With the redesign this week, I’m shift­ing to a more con­tin­u­ous devel­op­ment process. Tweak, break, fix, rinse, repeat. Before things set­tled too much I want­ed to get a per­for­mance base­line of the new theme in action. You have to have a start­ing point in order to judge improve­ment — so here are the numbers.

Methodology

All num­bers come from Firebug 2.0.3 run­ning on Firefox 31. Times above are the aver­age of three tests for each scenario.

Takeaways

Already on the to-do list is to imple­ment a build process with Grunt. That will take care of low­er­ing the request num­bers once the mul­ti­ple JS and CSS files are com­bined. It should also trim a few kilo­bytes once it ugli­fies everything.

Second, and more impor­tant, is upgrad­ing host­ing. The shared host­ing on Bluehost is great. I’ve never had any prob­lems, tons of fea­tures, and things work won­der­ful for the price. Now that I’m get­ting seri­ous and look­ing at the num­bers, per­for­mance is where you take the hit. Waiting for a response from the serv­er var­ied wild­ly with the quick­est response tak­ing 837 mil­lisec­onds and aver­ag­ing 2.69 seconds.

Not a bad start­ing point but it will def­i­nite­ly get better.