I ask you who wouldn’t be a little proud now? 🙂 A lot of the credit has to go to my friend Frank who shared with me this really amazing WebPageTest resource. OK so they gave me the grade and that makes me sound biased right? Well at first I got straight Fs from them. Then I used their tools and increasingly made recommended changes to how my site works until I got the grade up to where it is now. These made dramatic performance changes I can see with my own eyes, not just by using their tools.
At WebPageSpeedTest.org you can test any web page for free. To prevent ads you have to create an account but that’s free too. Then you get incredible detail on performance. In fact at first you won’t appreciate the scope of it. If you see something in the reports you might say “hmm.. I’ll have to think on that some.” That’s before you realize almost everything is a link to lots more detail.
Since I’m creating this platform for I hope years of service I want the base layer at least to be very snappy. I think I’m there now. Yeah I still have that ‘B’ – that’s because of a how a plugin I’m using works (and that was easy to figure out at their site along with seeing the modest performance-cost of this). But I like the plugin and the impact is minimal. WebPageTest ain’t my momma 🙂
In reality every page gets it’s own grade and this is just the grade of my home page. But if you get enough things right about the site itself then the average page will be reasonable without any real attention – at least that’s how it’s worked for me so far with my current mix of content/plugins/etc.