As an excuse to play around with some web stuff, I pretended my website was getting so much traffic it was costing me an arm and leg to host it, and that my users complained it was too slow for them. Because my website is statically generated, optimizing it was pretty low hanging fruit, so I set out to do a few tweaks to optimize it, and wrote them down here for future reference.

While looking at the demo site of Twenty Fifteen (the theme I use for this blog), I noticed it used infinite scrolling, where more articles get automatically loaded when you reach the end of the page. It looked like a neat thing to have, but since I didn’t actually use WordPress, I couldn’t use the plugins that provide infinite scrolling. Writing it myself seemed like more effort than it was worth, so I dismissed it at the time.

With Google rolling out an update penalizing non-mobile friendly sites, and my non-responsive website theme dating from 2009, I thought it was a good time to give my nanoc-based static blog a makeover. I looked around for something lightweight, minimalistic, responsive, and easy to customize, and finally settled on using the latest default WordPress theme, Twenty Fifteen. Although it’s is a bit light to my taste on larger screens, it really shines on mobile devices.

After 7 years of serving my blog/website with WordPress, I thought it was time to try something else. One of my biggest gripes about WordPress (apart from having to hold my breath on each version update) is that writing posts through a web UI isn’t very handy: it’s slow, inconvenient for complicated posts (especially if you’re used to your favorite editor), you can’t write while offline, and the versioning is limited (compared to real versioning systems).