Improve first-load performance

[chasenlehara]

If you load canjs.com with Slow 3G enabled in Chrome’s DevTools, you’ll see it takes ~20 seconds for everything to load. There are probably some easy things we can do to improve the load time.

[imaustink]

Preliminary testing seems to show there isn't much to improve on the client side: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcanjs.com%2F&tab=mobile

I would like to dig a little deeper here before making any final decisions. But in my experience, Google's page speed test is a pretty solid metric.

In my opinion, the biggest performance boost we could achieve would be from improve caching headers, and moving to HTTP/2, as most of the lag comes from the large number of individual connections. As far as I can tell, neither of these changes are possible with GH pages by itself. In the past, I've used CloudFlare to augment such functionality. If we wanted to pursue this option, I believe the free plan would work just fine for our needs.

Let me know if you have any other thoughts.

[imaustink]

• Static JS (probably won’t be able to find any quick wins here)
• Optimize images (drag & drop all our PNGs into ImageOptim)
• StealJS optimize build
• Too many buttons