I’m still in the process of optimising the site as much as possible in order to minimise resource usage on the server and make page delivery as fast as I can. This afternoon I used lossless compression on all of the images that make up this site and its content. It was a mostly automated task carried out by a third party server pulling images from my server, compressing them, and sending them back. The process seemed to hit the server’s ability to actually process page requests, so I disabled the site for a while to let the process complete. I deliberately didn’t compress anything too much, so hopefully nobody will notice any optical change in quality, but on average the file sizes were reduced by over 40%. I’ve tweaked further javascript to reduce the amount that is loaded, and in many cases, avoided the need for it to load at all. There are still further changes I can make that will optimise the site further, but given I’ve been addressing those with the most impact first, there will be diminishing returns.
I’m currently seriously thinking about using CloudFlare as a CDN. The result should be more stability (this server still has its peaks and troughs in performance), greater speed and greater security. I’ve never used a CDN before, and if I’d had the foresight, it’s something I’d have investigated a lot earlier in the process. What could possibly go wrong? I’m already imagining my next post bemoaning my decision to try a CDN when it all goes wrong…