Seagyn Davis
Efficiency vs Power

Efficiency vs Power

Reading time of post 1 min readDate when post was published18 November 2014
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that if you click on one of the links and purchase an item, I may receive a commission. All opinions however are my own and I do not accept payments for positive reviews. This is just a little way for me to monetize the time I spend writing for you.

Server Room

If you have been following this blog and my social media feeds over the last few weeks you might think that this post has to do with CrossFit, but it doesn't. Although the principle can be applied to CrossFit it actually has to do with something more on the geek side of my life.

Something that I've been really passionate about is fast loading times on websites. It's probably one of the most important factors in terms of user experience (UX) that you can get on a website. When it comes to making a website load quickly, especially on websites that are dynamic, there are hundreds of things that need to be done to get to that sweet spot of 4 seconds or below.

One of the ways web ops and developers try and get around page speed is by throwing power at their website or application. Basically they just add resources like extra memory and processing power (which is vertical scaling) and more nodes (which is horizontal scaling and is great for redundancy). My issue with this process is that it leads to an infinite amount of scaling that needs to be done to meet the growing demands on your website or application. You can even have automated processes in place to manage both vertical and horizontal scaling which could leave you with a nasty bill after your blog post made it onto the front-page of Reddit or your app got featured on Techcrunch.

That approach is obviously going to be required at some stage but when you first set out on getting that A-grade page speeds I don't think it's the place you want to be starting.

What I've been focusing on over the last few weeks it trying to make my websites load as efficiently as possible. That doesn't mean removing all the images and javascript. It means that when someone comes to your website or application that only the most necessary things are loaded to make the current visible content display correctly.

Now there are a range of things that can be done and I won't go into any of that in detail in this post. What you want to focus on is making sure that nothing prevents the user from starting their experience in as little time as possible. So things like javascript and images outside the users viewport (the area that your browser is displaying your website before scrolling) should only be loaded after the page had been displayed to prevent the user having to wait for that really "cool" animation that has been made.

Once you have the website running efficiently which includes making it have the lowest footprint possible, you'll hardly need any server power to make it load fast to a certain amount of visitors (a few hundred per second). This small investment in optimisation will save your thousands in the long run.

As I said earlier, I'm super passionate about it so please don't hesitate to ask me any questions you want about making your website or application load faster.

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