More Performance Improvements

We continue to do our annual big infrastructure update. Improvements to date have decreased average page load time across all devices (over 50% are mobile phones) from about 3.2 seconds to 2.85 seconds. While that does not sound like a lot, that is 980,000 seconds (11 days and 8 hours) of wait time last week across the 2.8 Million Page Views on RunSignUp.

Here are the latest updates:

• Switching from Google’s Content Delivery Network to CloudFlare’s CDN for jQuery libraries. This reduces the time it takes to load these libraries into browsers.
• Combined <link> tags for Google Fonts to improve performance.
• Reordered our HEAD script block to optimize performance.
• Load the AddThis share components after the page has loaded. We will likely replace these in the coming days to further optimize performance.
• Updated Facebook to load asynchronously.
• Cleaning up old CSS from our CSS files to decrease load size on each page by 20-25%.
• Moved some database queries from the main database to a shard.

These, combined with other improvements have dropped our average page load time