Make My Blog Faster

In day one, my blog was very fast. These days, I don’t feel it is as fast as it was long time ago. I started to add more and more elements to this blog, and unfortunately, it slows everything down a bit at a time, and now, it is not as fast as before.

At the same time, I am working very hard in my company to make Baixing.com even faster. These two things can be done in parallel, and I can use some tips and learning from this site and apply it to my blog.

I am a fan of Steve Souders, and reading his book High Performance Web Site, and his blog. I will apply those technical to this blog, and then report the result to my readers.

Here is a rough plan:

• Setup metrics - using Google Analytics to track time used on each page.

• Remove stuff - the less stuff on this page, the better

• Optimize CSS, and JS to ensure I am a minimalist

• Check data to see if it faster or not

I will keep updating this page (not new pages) about the progress, so you can check from time to time to know the progress.

Update May 5, 2009

Today, I added the tracking code to the individual archive page, so I can keep measuring what is happening to my network speed. Here is the code I used:

• Immediately after tag, add the following

• At the end of the file, add the following:

UA-XXXX-3 is my profile ID in Google Analytics. If you read the code more carefully, you see it generally calculate the time from the start of parsing the page (t_start) to the end of the page load (t_end or window.onload event), and then turn it into a folder structure and record it in Google Analytics. For example, 3402ms will be recorded as /speed/3/4/0/2, and thus I can do more analysis in the future.

It is always a good idea to setup measurement before doing anything (that is important), since it helps to guide you through a more certain road, than just wandering around, and run back and forth.