Thread: Website optimizations

Since optimizations could help with reducing the total bandwidth used per month and increase the overall website speed I have performed a few tests and observations to determine how the website could be optimized:

Web Page Performance
To provide a list of optimizations that would decrease the asset file size (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, static images), speed up the browser rendering time, and improve the end-user experience.
Research

• Homepage - http://stoptazmo.com
  14 requests - 378.48KB transferred (test results)
  HTML file size: 96.05KB
  Largest asset after HTML: http://stoptazmo.com/downloads/templ...css/layout.css - 103.48KB
• Manga Viewer - http://stoptazmo.com/downloads/manga...iend_x_000.zip
  50 requests - 10,317KB transferred (test results)
  HTML file size: 205KB
  Chapter images
• Manga Listing - http://stoptazmo.com/online-manga/se...t/entire_list/
  12 requests - 1,333KB transferred (test results)
  HTML file size: 1,056KB
  Largest asset after HTML: http://stoptazmo.com/downloads/templ...css/layout.css - 103.48KB

Improvements

• Optimize http://stoptazmo.com/downloads/templ...css/layout.css by
  • Removing unused CSS rules
  • Minifying stylesheet
• Optimize select drop-downs
  • Manga drop-down equals 164KB -- this may be a performance issue on browsers/machines
  • Other drop-downs are dependent on the series size
• Optimize JavaScript by
  • Minifying JavaScript
  • Concatenating JavaScript files
  • Load JavaScript files at the end of file
• Optimize DOM structure

Network Utilization

• Attempt to load jQuery from a CDN, and failover to local version
• Enable gzip compression
• Concatenate stylesheets into one file
• Concatenate JavaScript into one file
• Transfer static files to CDN
• Cache control for static files

A lot of work needs to be done for sure. I've already spent about 40 hours recoding all our current scripts, but I did not touch the front end of things. I do not plan on having a new build out for ST until next Friday and for sure layout.css will be cut down by at least half, along with I hope our new image gallery script. The real issue here is we are using old HTML coding and not CSS3 tables and other things, which has led to a larger than normal size for each of our pages. One thing that has been holding me back is the fact that I pretty much lose money each month of this site and have to focus my time on projects that make money. I'd like to thank you for helping me find the bug with our manga viewer (today I found more that will be fixed in the new script) and for other ways to improve this site. I'm going to do the best I can on our next build to get a lot of things fixed and some server side improvements done as well.

'preciate all the work that you've committed to improving the website -- if you're comfortable with sharing the workload or need assistance, I am able to lend some dev hours.

Originally Posted by dotuser

'preciate all the work that you've committed to improving the website -- if you're comfortable with sharing the workload or need assistance, I am able to lend some dev hours.

And I find it quite cool that you´re helping out so much

Originally Posted by BlueDemon

And I find it quite cool that you´re helping out so much

StopTazmo.com has been my manga source for a while, and if by helping the website improve to increase traffic and donations then I feel like I have contributed back.

Originally Posted by dotuser

'preciate all the work that you've committed to improving the website -- if you're comfortable with sharing the workload or need assistance, I am able to lend some dev hours.

I agree with BlueDemon, thank you for helping out so much. At this point I've rewritten most of the base code, with the exception of the manga gallery script as I was planning on tossing that junk. Our site is using a wordpress theme (downloads part), and I never stripped the CSS out. There really is not much left for anyone else to do, it would take them more time than it was worth to get familiar with the code base that I have, and in that time I could get it all done on my own. The real hard part was optimization, as the script was not designed for large amounts of traffic, taking our site down every few days with load spikes to over 50+. Anyways, today I am taking it easy and getting to work on my other smaller projects, although I will have another build posted today (for the misc series redirect) I will have a much larger update either Saturday or next Friday (probably next Friday).

Excited to see the next release -- it really shows your desire to improve the user experience and overall website value.

I can agree with your statement that explaining a highly technical project can require more time than fixing bugs and introducing features. Perhaps my offer to help could be redeemed on a task/project that does not require much or no knowledge of the existing code base such as collaborating with you on the online manga viewer frontend (HTML, JS, and CSS). If you're interested then we can start collaborating on your schedule.

Originally Posted by dotuser

Excited to see the next release -- it really shows your desire to improve the user experience and overall website value.

I can agree with your statement that explaining a highly technical project can require more time than fixing bugs and introducing features. Perhaps my offer to help could be redeemed on a task/project that does not require much or no knowledge of the existing code base such as collaborating with you on the online manga viewer frontend (HTML, JS, and CSS). If you're interested then we can start collaborating on your schedule.

The only real thing that will be seen by end users on the next major update is the gallery script. I'm going to just use the same script many other manga sites are using to save time, though I will make some addon's for SEO upgrades. That is the real key. I've been trying to do small things to help improve our SEO score. Thanks for the offer on the collaboration, but it's not really needed.