Understanding Website Load Times: The Waterfall Effect and Asset Optimization

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about five things that could potentially be making your website slow.

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3:00 - TTFB

• Slow DNS lookup
• Server on the other side of the world
• Slow server processing
• Network speed back to the browser

6:21 - Requests

• Too many requests
• Too large
• Waterfalling your requests

9:44 - Assets are too large

• Images are the biggest bloat in a site
• Compress and optimize via build tool or ImageOptim
• Make smaller
• Picture fill for mobile

14:48 - Lazy loading

• lazy=“true”
• Intersection observer
• Preload slider images two ahead

18:03 - Not using a CDN

• What is a CDN?
• Cloudflare is free, others are very cheap - we used Cloudfront
• Netlify is free and comes with a CDN

• WordPress
• Webpack
• Gulp
• gatsby-image
• Cloudinary
• Cloudflare
• Cloudfront
• Netlify

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