BlenderNation

Some Website Optimizations

Bart ·

Firebug network monitoringOver the last few weeks I’ve been quietly making a few technical changes to the site. For those of you who are interested in such things, I did a short writeup of my actions. If you couldn’t care less about web technology, I’m still interested in hearing if you think the site’s speed has improved!

  • As a first step, I used the excellent Firebug extension for Firefox to determine the loading time of the individual elements on our pages using Firebug’s Net module. Firebug does many other useful things – if you’re a web developer you should take a look at it!
  • Added mod_expires to the webserver. I asked our ISP to install the mod_expires Apache module on our webserver. Mod_expires sets the Expires HTTP header in server responses for specific filetypes which allows your browser to do better client-side caching. Initial visits will not be faster, but subsequent pageviews should be noticably quicker.
  • Turned on gzip encoding in WordPress. This was not trivial as the standard WordPress gzip option was interfering with our caching plugin. I found a fix for this though and ran a few tests: the filesize of our HTML code is reduced by around 84%: from around 56KB for the homepage to 9KB. Especially users on slow connections should notice this! (Of course, if your webserver has mod_gzip you can also use that instead of this technique).
  • Moved some JavaScript files around. I only recently learned something about JavaScript file includes: they will always be loaded sequentially, on all browsers. ‘Normal’ browser behaviour (for images and other page elements) is to load the files in parallel from the webserver. Firebug confirmed this and it was clear that the large number of Javascript files on our pages was causign them to slow down a lot. Moving some Javascript includes to the end of the HTML file doesn’t speed up the actual loading time, but the page will appear fully rendered sooner even though the browser is still loading some more files.
  • Removed the Lightbox plugin.The Lightbox plugin was responsible for the fancypants image-enlarge effect. It looked great, but I was starting to really dislike how you had to close an enlarged image. Oh, and of course dropping it shaved off a few milliseconds of loading time as well ;-).

I’ll keep looking for ways to improve BlenderNation’s speed (within our current hosting package). If you have any suggestions I’d be happy to hear them!

Of course, the big question is: did you notice any improvements lately? How’s the site speed for you now? Fast enough? Still too slow?

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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