We’re Turning Back On One of the Caching Systems Today So The Blog Should Start Loading Much Faster

Now that we’re back from Chicago, I’m going to try to spend a few hours each day working on the blog upgrades we’re rolling out as part of Google’s new focus on mobile-friendly sites.  With somewhere around 40% of the changes done on the backend, we’re reactivating the first of the cache tools today, combining it with the Cloudflare network to see if there are any conflicts.  It will take awhile to build the static pages that get served but by this evening, on most devices you should start to see a significant reduction in page load times as the non-dynamic reproductions are distributed over the CDN.  It might not be back up to full speed but then again, we could get lucky and it work right out the gate.  In any event, if the server becomes unstable and the site goes down during the tests, that’s what is happening.

If the first round of speed enhancements work without too many problems, we will at some point try to switch over to larger blog feature images to improve the experience.  Instead of what you see now when you visit the site, you’ll enjoy summary links like the one on this test page Aaron built (ignore the sidebars and such, this is just about the image size).

As always, updates will be posted on this page.

Update: As of Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 at 6:00 p.m., CST a worldwide cache reset was sent out from both the server and the CDN.  It will take 48 hours to reconstruct so you might experience some performance degradation during this period as the static pages build themselves.

^{Image Credit: hywards / Shutterstock}