It’s summer time, so we’re taking the opportunity to do some house cleaning on our blog about classroom technology. Getting rid of things that didn’t work, moving things around, and generally trying to spruce things up around the digital property.
It was embarassing to discover that our teacher blog was so slow that Yslow gave it a “D” and Google Webmaster tools said our site took on average, 18.5 seconds to load which is “slower than 100% of sites” on Google. (Having said that, we’re still making money which pays for a lot of the computer projects and sites that we do in the classroom.)
We made a few tweaks, sped things up to get a Yslow rating of A (96), and we’re trying out CloudFlare on our Bluehost account. Bluehost does CPU throttling which definetely slowed our sites down, but we’re hoping that CloudFlare caching will speed things up and reduce the strain on our pretty cheap shared hosting plan at Bluehost.
We’ll keep you posted.