2018-02-16 Speed Boost Incoming with Faster Page Loads

date: 2018-02-16 17:56:36+00:00

We're excited to announce a few updates that help make your website even faster- speed boost incoming! Some changes on the server side, and some on the front side. This isn't a super technical post, but if you'd like to skip reading it: TLDR; your website is faster now.

Front Side

Images below the fold are now lazy loaded. What does that mean? It means that any images that don't appear in the browser when you first land on a page will not be loaded until the user starts to scroll down.

This helps increase your website speed by reducing the number of requests and the bandwidth needed for loading each page. By delaying image loads below the fold, some websites saw a decrease in initial page weight of 50-75%!!

Here's an example: For an initial page load on a random shop page, before using lazy loading (and a few other optimizations), the total loaded from js + images was 658.08kb.

Now, with lazy loading enabled, we were able to descrease the page weight for js + images by about 200kb! We were also able to reduce the number of requests from 39 to 13! This means less round trips from your browser to our CDN/app servers:

Faster is better, and especially since most traffic now comes from mobile devices, any little improvement can make a difference when customers are using their smartphones to browse your website.

Image Optimizations

We've also finally completed going through every single customer we have and optimized all images! Nothing too technical here, basically if you have a background image that was 1mb, we were able to save you about 800kb on page load. That's just an example.

While we were at it, you might have also noticed a few design tweaks and updates on your website to help make it look cleaner, and we also modified a few color schemes for customers for better continuity throughout the site.

Server Side

We just finished up a decent amount of work optimizing some back-end server side caching processes.. just one change that we made decreased the web app server processing time by around 100 ms! We are now seeing an average of just 82ms for app server processing now, so we cut the average app server processing time by over half.

Box Menu Display

Another fairly small but impactful change is how we handle caching the menu contents for your boxes. The method that we cache the menu contents has been turbo-ized, and that combined with lazy loading the images of the individual products makes a big difference since these menus are displayed on every single front landing page!

Reduce Calls for each Page Load

We were also able to reduce the number of overall network requests required for each page which has helped as well!

Never Ending Quest

So that's just a few of the things we've been working on behind the scenes lately. Speed is a never ending battle, and we always strive for new and improved ways to deliver pages to your customers faster and more efficiently.

Have a question? Drop us a line on our contact page.