Making this site fast

One of the simplest ways to impress your users it to make your site fast. It’s incredibly important to the user experience. There’s a lot of data to support this.

I have been slowly redesigning the site over the last couple of weeks and I took it upon myself to make the site as fast as I possibly could. I did the same at CallFire, hacking Drupal to follow a few best practices. So here’s few things that I did:

• Set a performance budget of 200kb (I’m at 204 and hating myself right now)
• Limited requests, there’s no JS and 1 tiny CSS file (I recently removed modernizer because it was load blocking, not really sure if that was the best move)
• Installed WP Super Cache (its no secret I’m using WordPress
• Added rel=”preload” to the link tag and loadCSS as a polyfill
• Removed anything that WordPress tried to load automatically

I’m sure there’s a bunch that I’m missing. But the fact is that I was hovering around 2 seconds with my initial template before all of this, and as of tonight (thanks to loadCSS) I am rocking a 700-850 speed index on webpagetest.org.