New look – a focus on text and speed

Custom Creative has had a bit of a makeover. Now my time is largely spent on projects at Helpful Technology I have decided to move the focus of this site from marketing my services to the blog content. With this comes a renewed commitment to write more… good intentions at least.

While restructuring the site I decided it was time for a visual refresh too. Particularly due to the focus on reading a high performance theme was in order – I settled on Fastr (available on GitHub) and created my own fork. So far the changes are minor – styling tweaks for taste & accessibility, and support for some new WordPress features including title-tag & custom-logo.

Now Fastr lived up to is name anyway – with no JavaScript and minimal CSS it is already a high performance theme – but with a couple of plugins things really start to fly. This site has now hit the heady heights of 99% performance ratings on both Yslow and Pagespeed.

Page size for this sitePerformance scores for this site
The two main factors getting us here, after the theme, are Autoptimize and WP Super Cache.

Autoptimize concatenates and minifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; it can also inline and defer if chosen. This reduces file sizes and DNS lookups. Since this site is so lightweight I chose to inline all CSS as this can drastically reduce the time to first render and the apparent loading speed for users.

WP Super Cache creates static HTML versions of your site to save the latency and load of accessing the database to generate the site.

In front of the site there is also Varnish – this is hosted on Gandi’s PAAS which comes with Varnish pre-configured, I highly recommend them for anything not requiring a dedicated server – and then Cloudflare. As I have said however, most of the speed in this case actually comes from the plugins and theme itself.

I hope you like the new site – there’s bound to be some tweaks to appearance and configuration of the next few weeks, and hopefully more than a few posts.

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One response to “New look – a focus on text and speed”

  1. Sah avatar
    Sah

    I love the word concatenates x

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