Last month we noticed another site that was worthy of our Speedup Hall of Fame. Check out this marketing website that took its average load time from 4.5 seconds down to 2 seconds:
And not only is that faster – but more consistent! The graph prior to the optimization is pretty jumpy. But after is almost a straight line. We like consistency!
Let’s take a look at the individual speed metrics to see how this was accomplished:
Wow, the biggest relative change here is the orange line – the Time To First Byte. That’s how long it takes your server to return the first part of the html content. It’s the very first thing that can be done before any css, images, or javascript can be parsed.
Typically you see a big change in TTFB when you move web hosts. But that wasn’t the case here – the IP address of the server was the same before and after. So what would account for this performance increase? Most likely a caching layer or plugin. Caching layers allow your page to be saved in a spot on the server (usually memory) where it can quickly be retrieved so it isn’t recalculated every time it’s accessed.
What’s great is this improvement affects all devices/browsers immediately. Here’s showing how desktop visitors as well as mobile users instantly saw the benefit:
I should also mention that there was a good 10 or so resources called by third party tracking scripts that had been removed. Those definitely improved things as well – but the biggest factor here was caching.
Great work! Godspeed!