{"id":1492,"date":"2010-04-28T08:03:01","date_gmt":"2010-04-28T16:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/speed-feature-number-one"},"modified":"2017-01-22T19:05:19","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T03:05:19","slug":"speed-feature-number-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/speed-feature-number-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Speed: Feature Number One"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have learned our lesson.<\/p>\n

We run a website for raw food recipes and discussion, called Gone Raw. It\u2019s been up for three and a half years now – originally as a custom-built Rails application, then in Drupal. And while we\u2019ve always enjoyed running the site, our biggest issue has been that it felt slow.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve long felt that the speed of a website is more important than most people assume. Fred Wilson recently gave a great talk on 10 Golden Principles for Building Successful Web Applications<\/a> in which his very first item was speed<\/strong>. I\u2019m just going to quote him here directly.<\/p>\n

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won\u2019t use it. I see this more with mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of sympathetic eye to the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they\u2019re willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife and kids, they\u2019re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they\u2019re just gone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So true. And when Wilson refers to a \u201cweb application,\u201d I would extend this to all websites. There\u2019s not much difference.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t go into the technical details, but we decided this week to move Gone Raw to the latest-and-greatest Drupal-based hosting technology. Our goal was to make it faster. And it is – on average, a visitor sees pages load five times faster!<\/em> That\u2019s nothing to sneeze at. In fact, once you\u2019re browsing around the site, the pages often load so fast you would miss them if you blinked.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s more like it. Though Gone Raw is a free site, it depends in part on advertising revenue to stay worthwhile to us. And more visitors, with faster pages, is only going to help. We can\u2019t wait to use this great technology on more of our websites in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have learned our lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9051,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[479],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/i\/IMG_2308.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}