Major Performance Improvements

It's no secret that performance is a big deal to us around here at Themeco. We believe there is always something we can be doing just a little better in order to make X more performant. The 2.2.0 release on July 15, 2014 was centered around some very big and important performance updates with regards to the Customizer, that coincidentally have improved frontend performance as well.

On the backend in the Custoimzer, the time it used to take to load the page HTML averaged around 3.36s with the page load event firing around 6s (remember that there is a lot of data loaded into the Customizer to handle all of the functionality carried out there). After the update we saw that HTML load drop to around 0.638s with the page load event firing around 2.4s. This means that on average we were seeing an 81% decrease in HTML display and 60% decrease in the time it takes for the page load event to fire. Similarly, on the frontend we saw HTML display times drop from 1.02s to 0.703s on a test page with a significant amount of self-hosted content and third-party content, resulting in a 31% decrease here as well.

Ultimately, the most important thing to take away from all of this is that you should notice enhanced performance both in the Customizer and on the frontend of your website by updating to v2.2.0 of the theme.

Within hours we were receiving comments such as this from our customers:

The last update was great. My website went from 2.50s+ load times to a range of 554ms to 1.50s. Major improvement. Thank you!

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