Mandatory new website post

It's been 3 years, 3 months and 28 days since this site first went online on 8 Oct 2011. But until today, you couldn't have told by looking at it. 92,191 pageviews later and my website was still the same old badly put together WordPress powered fart.

I knew I had to update it. I had started working on it at least 3 times in the past. Luckily, a few days ago I finally snapped and now it's finally done :)

Running webpagetest.org on the landing page before and after the redesign shows that

• load time 6.566s → 1.116s ⇒ 5.88 times faster
• page size 801 KB → 67 KB ⇒ 11.95 times smaller
• requests 35 → 11 ⇒ 3.18 times fewer

Now before I pat myself on the back and shake my hand vigorously, allow me to walk you through what I did to get to these results:

• throw out WordPress (it's a hell of a lot more than what I needed for this website)
• write the minimum amount of HTML and CSS for the design
• switch to helpful-site (static site generator with css and js minification)
• run every png image on the site through tinypng.com

It might not seem like much, but they all add up. And with more and more people surfing the web via smartphone, these numbers really matter.

Here's to a better experience on the web and less excuses to write out new posts!

:) easter eggs included (: