Posts Tagged ‘performance’

Frank Under Fire—How a WordPress Theme Designed for Speed Performed Under High Traffic Conditions

I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine a few weeks ago showcasing Frank. As was expected, my site got bombed. Since Frank was designed from the ground up to be fast, I wanted to share the results of how Frank performed on a high volume traffic day. It’s important to know that my site is hosted on a medium-tier VPS with no CDN. Read On…

Design for Speed

The homepage of Some Random Dude as of today is 39.6Kb spread across 5 requests (13.1Kb and 2 of those requests are Google Analytics). Over 30% of pages sampled load in 1 second or less. 74.5% of pages sampled load in 3 seconds or less. These numbers increase dramatically when you restrict the sample page loads to countries with high broadband adoption. This site performs this way not because of a plugin I installed or the server’s Apache settings (although they help). It performs this way because of tough decisions made in the design process. This site was designed to be fast. Read On…