I recently hit a pretty remarkable achievement in web development, one that I’m rather proud of.
In this day and age, websites have become largely miserable. They are big, bloated and take forever to load. This problems hit pretty much all the major websites and especially social media.
In the age of blazing fast, high throughput networks this seems entirely counter intuitive. The speed of your connection doesn’t even matter anymore.
It is not at all uncommon for websites to take three to ten seconds to load. Think about how much time of your life that is wasting when you add it all up!
I’ve always had a development goal for my own personal websites. They should be fast!
Over the decades that I’ve operated an array of several websites, I’ve had some pretty fast sites.
A few years ago, I finally entered what could be called the “1 second” club.
Basically, that means having a decent website that loads in under one second. It’s a lot more difficult to achieve than most people think. It takes a lot of discipline, care and working with the right tools for the job to get websites to load that fast.
Well, recently I managed to hit the “1/4 second club!”
One of my larger hobby sites has finally hit that remarkable achievement. Not just that, but blew past it! By almost 115 milliseconds!
It’s literally so fast that it has all ready finished loading before you can possibly make your brain think to start scrolling.
I have practically surpassed the speed of human mind and reaction time! 135 milliseconds!
Where it really helps me, though, is that most of the search engines out there recognize it. Site speed, especially on mobile, is a major contributor to rankings these days. I see it on some of my top sites, getting results I probably don’t deserve.
And then, just to show off, I’ve almost hit the “Sub 100 millisecond” club on my personal website. It’s super lightweight, so not unexpected, but it proves the process can be replicated.
This is probably in the upper echelons of site speed. If I had to take a stab, the top 99.9%.
This site (Frostynetworks.com), of course, is not that fast. It’s hosted in Fairbanks, Alaska. The minimum distance any given request must take is 3,600 miles. Likely a fair bit longer.
But it’s still fast. And in the “1 second club” despite being hosted at the edge of the internet!