Here at Brilliant Directories, we're continuously optimizing the software to make pages load as fast as possible without affecting functionality. As our development team continues to release 100 - 150 new updates each month to add new functionality, make the platform easier to use, and maximize security, we always have an eye on site speed and suggestions.
We have projects on our immediate roadmap that are focused on optimizing database queries and minimizing the server response time to make pages load faster than ever and improve those scores even more. This is an aspect of the software we are always iterating on and will continue to make it a priority moving forward.
Here are some of the strategies we have implemented to optimize the performance of our sites.
What we already do to optimize for speed
- Enable gzip compression on the server-side to decrease the load time of assets.
- Minify all javascript and CSS files hosted on our servers to reduce their size (some externally-hosted libraries provided by Facebook, Google, etc may not be).
- Optimize redirects needed to load pages on a site to require as few as possible.
- Use browser caching to load as few assets as possible on each subsequent visit to the site (explained in the link above).
- Optimize SQL queries and PHP code to reduce server response time as much as possible.
- Every day our development team continues to refactor existing code to optimize for speed, and we have identified further opportunities to defer the loading of javascript libraries to improve page load times even further.
Here is an example of a brand new directory site compared with a high-performing popular site like Amazon.com: