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Oh no… I think I might be a perfectionist.

What was I thinking starting a blog? It’s been three days since my first post and while I had every intention of posting something sooner, I couldn’t. I’ve had some really great post ideas, but I just couldn’t bring myself to post anything until the site was perfect. Perfect in regards to speed.

After making my first post late Saturday night, I was eager to make some performance tweaks Sunday before my second post. Well, that never happened. I’m not sure when it happened, but my site crashed on mobile. Meaning that if you were to try accessing it from your iPhone, you’d find a nice…Fatal Error.

Now, whether or not you know anything about computers, I’m sure you can understand that this error of mine was no good. In my attempt to figure out what was causing the problem and fix it, I broke the desktop version of my site as well. I later discovered that it was a compatibility issue with the mobile module of the Jetpack plugin and my current website theme. So I made some adjustments and everything was up and running again. Great, so I could write my second blog post. Wrong.

Somewhere in this process I discovered Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This is one of the many incredibly handy tools that Google provides to developers. The PageSpeed Insights tool measures the performance of your webpage, both for mobile devices and desktops. It then spits out a score that ranges from 0 to 100; a higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. The results outline possible problem areas and suggestions for improvement.

To make a long and sad story short, I spent countless hours Sunday and Monday tweaking the site. Activating and deactivating plugins; tweaking those plugins; digging around the settings of my web hosting provider and even trying some CDNs. The WPBeginner blog has a nice infographic explaining what exactly a CDN is, you can take a look at that here. My work is far from over. It’s funny really, why should I care about how fast my website loads on your phone or computer? Although I have a couple hundred hits on my page, those were mostly me running speed tests. I’m pretty sure the only one that read my first post was my mother.

Site speed and optimization is crucial on large websites that receive traffic in the [hundreds of] thousands each day. Between my mother who is sure to look at this post and myself, the traffic to this page will not have a negative impact on page speed. It’s not of any importance on my little blog, but It’s important to me. It’s important, not because I may someday have the type of traffic that requires that perfect speed score, but because I want this website to be the best it can be. I want it to perform at 100% now. Because, why not?

I think I’m pretty easy going. Rarely do I get stressed out or let external stressors bother me. I’m not particularly fond of deadlines, although I respect them. It’s very likely that I’ll procrastinate, as I did for nearly every assignment I had as a college student. But I don’t hand in bad work, I only bring my very best to the table. As I previously said, my work here on this website is far from over. I worked at the restaurant tonight and it’s now 1:32am on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll go to bed now, but it’s much more likely that I’ll tweak a few more things under the hood of the site.

I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I think I might be a perfectionist.

 

 

 

Published in Personal Technology

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