I’ve finally completed optimizing my website and I’m very happy with the end result. I’ve also replaced the Gallery Page with a brand new gallery plugin. Finally, it is fully optimized.
Pingdom
I’ve analyzed the result data to find what part of my website I need to optimize. I was using Pingdom to test my loading time from different areas of the globe. The final results are very satisfying. All page load are within my goal of under 5 seconds.
Hurdles
I have to learn a lot about caches, http header, cookies, etc. and for each feature I update it becomes really clear to me why these are important. I’ve also optimize the URL forcing my home page to use HTTPS instead of the regular HTTP. Then I searched for a plugin that will optimize my html, js, and css but the plugin I found went on a loop that almost locked me out of my website. It also used a lot of resources that is against my webhost’s term of service. So any visitors during that time would not have been able to see my website.
Gallery Debacle
My Gallery plugin stopped working all of a sudden and I contacted support to find out why. I was in the middle of optimizing the images using an images optimizer plugin. It was a not a smooth process since I found out that they have obsoleted my current gallery without notifying me. They just invalidate my API Key. The tech support helping me can probably tell how irritated I am so they gave me a business edition copy of the gallery. The standard edition was not working no matter what I do. It’s nice that I get a free upgrade for my gallery but it’s not very nice that all SQL and folder reference are all broken. So I spent tonight rebuilding my gallery.
Well, that’s done. I can now go back writing about the games I play.
