There, I have finished applying an entire round of webpage performance optimisations. eHarmony Blog should be one of the fastest-rendering websites that you visit today. You should be able to start reading the first page you visit after 1 to 4 seconds, and the second and subsequent pages should appear instantaneously.
I’m hope the site is making you ask, ‘why are other sites so damn slow?’
To bring you this speed, we have taken the theme and a few WordPress plugins apart. Among the optimisations were:
- Combining or eliminating CSS and Javascript files to reduce server requests.
- Embedding image data unto the HTML and CSS to reduce server requests in non-IE browsers. In other words, today, the tiny images in these pages and the orange rss feed icon above are no longer separate image files that need additional requests to the server. data: URI scheme in Wikipedia explains how it works.
- Telling the browser and any intervening caches to retain the images, CSS and Javascript files in its cache for weeks. In other words, when you visit your second page now, or when you visit us again on Thursday, for example, your browser just downloads one file, the main HTML.
- Replacing the large image files in the posts with lower-resolution or lower-fidelity ones.
- Removing whitespace in the CSS and Javascript files and then transmitting all the HTML, CSS and Javascript files in gzip-compressed form to reduce the bytes transferred.
I hope you find the site as responsive as I do. We appreciate any input to make this site even better.
The Four Colours of eHarmony Blog
This image depicts the four colours of eHarmony Blog:
These colours guarantee that eHarmony screenshots look great on the blog articles, while remaining distinct from the eHarmony.com branding.
Addendum
I’m also trying something crazy in the next seven days: I’m turning off comment moderation — all comments are instantly approved. We’ll see what riot happens.
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