Performance enhancement testing

[querkmachine]

General performance enhancements wherever possible.

30th March: WebPageTest - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160330_RN_DR5/

• 1.5 seconds to first paint. 4.0 seconds to load social feed. 7.3 seconds to fully loaded.
• Spends ~4.5 seconds sitting at 96-99% completion. Why?

[querkmachine]

Since last test: Have put a Max-Age on static assets (images, icons, CSS and JS files) to try and pull up our caching score. This is capped at 2 days however until cachebusting is implemented. We've also activated Jetpack however, which may slow us down as it introduces extra file loads.

Async loading the social feed has been implemented but not deployed yet. Should re-test when done so.

22nd April: WebPageTest - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160422_3M_X53/

• Note: This test was run from London instead of Manchester, as the Manchester server was non-responsive.
• 0.9 seconds to first paint. 5.1 seconds to fully loaded. Good improvement.
• Still a really long time (nearly 4 seconds) waiting for homepage to download. Likely caused by social feed.
• No CDN for images is dragging the overall score down dramatically.

[querkmachine]

Cachebusting has been implemented and the social feed async changes deployed. Max-Age has been set up to 28 days (up from 2). This and future tests will be from London, as the Manchester server seems to have been removed from service.

25th April: WebPageTest - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/160425_AK_1JV7/

• 1.4s to first paint. Gone up, no idea why.
• 3.0s to fully loaded. Great improvement.
• Poor rating for image compression due to meet images currently on the page. Possible to shrink these somehow?
• No max age on the pages themselves (though this would need to be very low if implemented.)
• No CDN still dragging scores down dramatically.

[querkmachine]

A new design was pushed to live last night. It uses more imagery but also has more concessions to make it to first paint, and has swapped out the body text webfont in favour of using system fonts to additionally aid performance.

12th August: WebPageTest - https://www.webpagetest.org/result/160812_N7_1D4P/

• Load times in general are up, this appears to be because the social feed took significantly longer to load than in previous tests. Probably refreshing cache?
• 1.6s to first paint.
• 4.0s to fully loaded.
• Once again the uncompressed meet images (as well as the large, uncompressed header image) are main source of issues.

Proposals for improvement:

• Add SVG MIME type to image caching. This isn't being caught at the moment.
• Look at ways of doing image compression on the fly. Perhaps run uploaded media through the gulp imagemin task intermittently?
• Add max-age/expires to the social feed.
• Re-explore CDN options. Possible to just symlink a subdomain for this?