

Ask HN: How do I hire someone to make my site faster? - sixQuarks

I run a couple of sites that I'd like to speed up but know nothing about CDN and other technical things.  How would you go about hiring someone who could help with this?  Or are there any services I can use?
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samlev
Your first step is to look at a few simple tools that could give you ways to
get perceived (and actual) speed-ups. These are your low hanging fruit, before
spending time (and money) on infrastructure upgrades.

Look for a 'YSlow' plugin for your chosen browser (they exist for Chrome and
Firefox), which can help you to identify things that are causing your site to
appear slow.

After that, then I would look at CDN, and then I would look at database
optimisation (many people just don't "get" indexes, and don't understand how
much of a difference they can make), and finally code optimisation.

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sixQuarks
That's good advice, but that's what I need help with. I don't know how to look
into database optimization, CDN, etc. Where should I go to find someone to
help? Are there forums, or services that do this?

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samlev
You could probably hire a free-lancer to get most of this stuff going for you
(there are plenty of sites around for hiring people to do small jobs).

Ultimately, though, you should look at trying to do as much as you can
yourself. The better you understand your system, the better you can run your
company.

Still, CDN and database optimisation isn't the first place to start. As I
mentioned, look at YSlow, which should give you a few places to work on for
optimising your sites.

As mentioned by someone else, depending on the technology your sites are
running on, there may also be plugins/tools available to speed things up with
little to no real effort.

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JoachimSchipper
Before doing anything clever/expensive, why don't you try CloudFlare?

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drKarl
I didn't know about CloudFare, thank you!!

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dangrossman
Do these sites use a prebuilt CMS? Most have a cache plugin, and if you're not
doing any caching of mostly-static pages, that'll probably fix all your
problems instantly.

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noahc
Email me noah@noahc.net the URL and the reason why you're trying to make it
faster. I'll take a look at it and get back to you with the low hanging fruit.

