The UC Riverside site in its current state suffers from large file sizes, poor preloading, and ineffective caching policies. To remedy this and try to improve the performance of the site, we explored using file minification, image compression, and a more effective caching policy. By creating a local copy of the site, we were able to perform these optimizations and see their performance impact in real time.
This was the performance report of the UCR site on 05/20/2020
Our more detailed report is here
Summary of optimizations
- Moved all static assets to our CDN
- Leverage Caching of static assets
- HTML, CSS and JS Minification
- Removing unused JS and CSS
- Image Compression
- Lazy Loading Images
- Remedy some security concerns
Effectively compressing and serving the site through our CDN which better leverages caching.
Our first byte time saw a reduction of 86%, start render saw a 58% time reduction, first contentful paint saw a 58% reduction, and the speed index saw a 70% reduction. We were also able to reduce the number of requests and the time to fully load the document.