
Smashing Magazine just got 10x faster - soulwatcher
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-just-got-10x-faster/
======
caseydurfee
"800 ms time to first load to 80 ms"

It's a mistake to equivocate TTFB with being 10x faster for the user. It's
clickbait. The vast majority of that speedup is not from using static files,
but from putting the data on a global CDN (Amazon's Cloudfront in this case -
Netlify didn't build their own.)

Put it this way: if you have caching, and a page on your site gets hit 1000
times, 999 times it's going to be as fast for the user no matter what the
backend technology used is because it's not going to the backend. So if the
first hit takes 800 msec against Wordpress, then the other 999 requests take
80 msec, then using the static file instead of Wordpress only makes it 1%
faster, not 10x faster.

For the record, the new Smashing Magazine design is visually complete in about
4.5 seconds:
[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_MY_PJ5/1/details/#...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_MY_PJ5/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1)

The old one is visually complete in about 5.8 seconds:
[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_T8_Q2D/1/details/#...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_T8_Q2D/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1)

So, in both cases, time to first byte is a small fraction of how much time it
takes for the page to look done to the user, and by no reasonable criterion
should it be considered 10x faster now.

By putting their stuff on a decent CDN instead of whatever the heck
"auslieferung.commindo-media-ressourcen.de" is, they made their page 25%
faster. That's great! But it's bizarre to see something that is pretty much
how Movable Type worked in 2002 as a breakthrough in web performance or
technology.

The secret sauce here is using a global CDN, not being buzzword compliant.
Setting up Varnish is not particularly hard. Setting up Cloudfront or another
CDN is not particularly hard. You could do that and still use Wordpress, if
that's what you like.

~~~
bobfunk
We do run our own CDN at Netlify, and that's what allow us to serve the actual
HTML pages out of edge caches while handling atomic deploys and instant cache
invalidation.

This matters less when you test from New York (where Smashing Magazine hosts
their Wordpress version of the site).

Here's how the performance difference looks like for people in Melbourne:

[https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbYpJA/https://www.smashingmaga...](https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbYpJA/https://www.smashingmagazine.com/)
[https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/exYLwO/https://next.smashingmag...](https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/exYLwO/https://next.smashingmagazine.com)

The most important part of this difference comes from Netlify delivering the
complete initial HTML in less than 100ms compared to more than 2 seconds wait
time for the initial HTML load on the Wordpress version.

I'm sure Smashing will see an noticeable uptick in engagement in many parts of
the world due to this (it's an effect we've seen before).

(PS. Movable Type's approach was awesome, but the infrastructure around doing
static deploys and full static builds was just not up to the task back then,
and browsers were way more primitive, so you would end up needing a monolithic
dynamic site for just about anything with some form of user interacion)

------
matt4077
To repeat a comment I made too late to be seen in the CMS announcement thread
yesterday:

I wish people would actually use open protocols instead of private APIs, at
least in cases where both seem to be available.

As far as I can see, the only feature this needs that only github provides is
pull requests – omitting those would still leave you with a useful CMS, and
the information could also be communicated in, for example, branch names. That
way, you could conceivably use any client you want to work on the repo. So
instead of implementing Gitlab next, why not make it work with git?

This situation reminds me of email clients and libraries, many of whom now use
private APIs of a bunch of providers instead of SMTL and IMAP.

~~~
calavera
Hi,

Netlify CTO here.

You're right, everything that the CMS does currently could also be done with
raw Git messages. The CMS is designed to have pluggable backends. We had an
early version working with Git directly. We decided to focus in one backend at
a time rather than having several half integrated because the core features
were evolving too fast to support several backends initially.

We plan on support raw Git in the future again. It's a matter of making sure
it's useful for more people other than developers that already know how to use
Git.

~~~
bwb
Awesome work dude, I am really impressed!

------
ezequiel-garzon
A few days ago Smashing Magazine published this post on their transition:
[https://next.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/a-little-
surprise-...](https://next.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/a-little-surprise-is-
waiting-for-you-here--meet-the-next-smashing-magazine/)

Edit: The article points out that this is not just about switching to a CDN,
but also about streamlining their publishing process:

 _In the past, we were using WordPress as a CMS, our job board was running on
Ruby, and at one point we switched to Shopify from Magento for our online
shop. Not only was maintenance of four separate platforms incredibly
complicated, but designing a consistent, smashing experience the way we
envisioned it proved to be nearly impossible due to technical restrictions or
requirements imposed by these platforms._

------
imaginenore
Why is it newsworthy? Smashing Magazine is a static website. Putting it on a
CDN is the most obvious, most efficient, and the cheapest optimization.

The whole thing reads like a Netlify ad.

~~~
scribu
I agree that it feels like an ad campaign, especially since the CMS was on the
front page recently.

The speed improvements could have been achieved without switching from
WordPress, by installing a caching plugin with a CDN option.

~~~
troymc
If you read the article, you'll find that Smashing tried many different
caching plugins for WordPress, and they all had problems.

~~~
bobfunk
It's also worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not just articles (and
comments), but also a full E-commerce, job board, event page, ticket checkout
and introduced a new membership section with subscriptions.

Obviously all of that can still be done with a static front-end today (and
with one front-end instead of 4 different ones), but that's actually what's
newsworthy and it's hardly what anyone would traditionally think of as a
"static website" :)

------
overcast
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