Optimisation of this site has been a big task. It always feels like you’ve finished once a site is built and functioning correctly, but as with any software development, proper testing takes time, and so does getting things running as smoothly as possible. I’ve been using GTMetrix as my main method of performance testing as they automate a lot of tests very quickly, and I can simulate different browsers, devices, geographical locations, etc. Along the way I’ve compressed all CSS, HTML and javascript, deferred whatever can be deferred until the page has actually rendered, losslessly optimised images, streamlined server-side and browser-side caching, enabled a distributed proxy server, and what seems like heaps more. I think I’ve gone as far as I can now. It’s reached the stage that optimising one thing for minor gains actually has adverse effects either of performance elsewhere, or worse, on the site layout or functionality. Despite the amount of images and the number of data accesses, etc happening on the home page, I’ve got the loading times down to <1 second. Striving for further gains seems pointless. I believe the site to currently be bug-free and working as quickly as it possibly can. Hopefully future posts in this section will only relate to site improvements and new functionality 🙂