Site optimization is usually not too important until you have a good flow of traffic coming your way. However, your sites page speed might just help you get a boost in that department, so it's always good to follow best practices when developing a site.
I currently have 4 or 7 sites, depending on what you consider a site. Do I own 7 domains? yes. Do I work on 7 sites? Of course not. I wish. Sounds like a fun time. I have a few sites that I spend most of my time on. And after years of adding features that only I find cool, I decided to work on optimization. Very important when working with a 4$ a month shared server.
My Results
Since Google dictates the majority of my traffic to one of my sites, I decided to allow it to tell me how to improve it. Google PageSpeed is an awesome free tool that will analyze your website and tell you where it falls short performance wise. You can check out the webpage here or install the chrome plugin, which I did. The plugin runs alongside the Chrome inspector, which anybody working on front-end spends their life in. So I picked the site I work on the most, and this is what happened.
The Results
...were not that great. I passed 13 of the mighty tests, but fell short in about a dozen or so. Which brings us to the point of this post. I will run through everything PageSpeed told me and break down what I did about it, if anything, and how it affected my site. Stay tuned as I will go 1 by 1 through that list and check them off my list, or not, depending on if I think it makes sense to implement or not.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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