I just couldn’t resist the temptation of trying to get my Speed Index below the magic 1000 number*.

The first efforts I made were eliminating any external requests where possible; in fact, I’d already started making a few tweaks as a result of Jacques Mattheij’s Fastest Blog post. The rest were made after testing on WebPageTest.

Changes made:

  • Hosted the Creative Commons image, used in the footer, locally.
  • Used my own search form, still passing off to DuckDuckGo, as opposed to using their iframe.
  • Provide gzipped versions of all files; And that is as far as I can go with my webserver, Keep-alive and Caching are not an option.
  • Moved styles inline; much to my chagrin it does improve things. Fortunately it is still just as easy to manage from my point of view as I’ve just moved the file from /styles to /_includes.
  • Moved the Google Web Fonts stylesheet to a <link> instead of using an @import; I’m not getting rid of Web Fonts as I don’t want to be ugly, plus it’d be a crime not to use Vernon Adams’ fonts.

Of course, I’m not really sure there is a lot of point in making a site that no one reads really fast to load, but nevermind.

* - This is with the default US server test though, so I imagine faster still from the UK, but I’m still not very mobile friendly; I care far more about Elinks than mobile browsers.