The bacon-scented underpants gnomes have been busy this weekend, and have improved web server performance for OCmodshop. Here’s how we improved site load times by 2000%.
Well, it was really just me locking myself in the OCmoffice all weekend and ignoring everyone. But we really do have a monkey in a closet banging out the news. Honest.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux web server had been hosting some other projects that are no longer relevant, and those have been cleaned up.
Faster and Better user experience
We’ve improved site performance by a significant margin. We improved site caching, and added a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to increase speed all across the globe.
Related posts have been made more accurate. We had to re-tag all of the relevant posts (we had the idea all wrong). We also removed a lot of the “noise” articles, which are now archived. We changed the news and gallery pages so they’re not mixed in with other content
We also noticed that a noteable percentage of our inbound traffic comes from Clickjackers. So we added some measures to help prevent that.
The Image Gallery has also been improved. The images have been laid out more aestetically, and the experience is more consistent.
Database improvements
We reduced the SQL load by over half! There were a LOT of unused meta-fluff in the tables that were just taking up space. We deleted the old tables and optimized the database.
We then implemented code directly into the site rather than using wasteful plugins. Since plugins don’t talk to each other, they keep getting the same information over and over that has already been retrieved. That reduced the number of queries from 160 down to 80.
We then made the parts of our site that don’t change very often (mostly menus and meta information) static, so they are not adding to the database load. That brought the queries down even further to 58.
So that I can justify that I didn’t waste an entire weekend: Here’s a full list of the site improvements.
OCmodshop improvements
- New aggregate reviews!
- Added CDN (Content Delivery Network)!
- Added site-wide caching!
- Reduced average number of database queries from 160 to 58
- Code optimizations and minifications
- Default placeholder images for articles that have no Featured image
- Made Related Posts more accurate
- Added relevant author info at the end of pertinent articles
- Lots of SEO improvements
- Improved Image Gallery
- Added frame-busting code
- Fixed broken CSS and layout
Server Configuration
- Added SSL support!
- Removed old sites from configuration
- Security improvements
- Reduced database from 500MB down to 250MB
- Trimmed unused plugins and SQL tables
- Preparation for multisite
Oh, and I even cranked out a few articles (including this one).