Performance wins

As our busiest time of the year draws upon us, we wanted to really dive into the performance of our site and see if could improve it at all. We've done most meaningful on-site tweaks over the past year or so as we continually strive for performance perfection, but we've spent the first part of today working at the network level.

With that in mind, we've done a few things. Firstly we did actually change on on-site aspect - we modified the way some dynamic data is loaded onto cocktail pages (comments mostly) so they only load when coming into view. This helps for comment heavy pages quite a bit.

But then we moved to a network level and dived into all our Cloudflare logs and data, and tried to figure out exactly what was going on with our cache, routing and more. With that in mind we found some massive performance improvements from smarter routing to smarter image compression. We also added some next level caching rules to ensure we serve cache properly (especially with images coming from email campaigns which often add querystrings for tracking and the like).

From an initial play around, the site just feels snappier, but we'll give it a few days and see the before and after metrics. Happy (performant) holidays all.