I have been wanting to write this article for quite a time now, and today I found the time to do it. First off I want to say I'm not an expert or something when it comes to optimizing websites but I try to do my best, and share my thoughts and findings with you guys. This article will explain how I reduced the load time of this nucleus website from approximately 8.28 sec to 1.74 sec. Why is this important, well because:

Recent research shows that website users will not wait longer than 4 seconds for a website to load. After 4 seconds, customers will leave the site and seek an alternative site. Alarmingly, the research also shows that if a site fails to load within 4 seconds, users will be left with a negative brand perception.

This website is served by the well known hosting service DreamHost. I have been very pleased with their services so far, they provide plenty web space and bandwidth for a blog (for sure) and their customer support is also awesome. The only lack is their servers aren't the fastest around especially when you make a lot of http requests and SQL queries, but hey what can you ask for such a low price.

Speed Graph without Optimization
I thought it would be better to split this article in a few parts because some of the methods that will be used are only for nucleus CMS users and others are for all web designers. On the left you will see an image of the load time of my website without using any of the optimizing methods, it fully loaded in a time of 8.28 seconds (measured with Safari).



The following links are the parts of the complete article:


Resources you should explore if you are serious about optimizing your website: