Update: This post was originally written on another website when I first began building out my CMS. Later, I migrated it, along with several other posts, to Wisedocks. I’m leaving it up as a reminder of how much a leaner CMS was needed for this site, and I hope it adds context to this post. Now back to your regularly scheduled program...
I've spent the last few days hunting down errors on this site. A great deal of effort has gone into building this site from scratch. I don't want to rely on any external scripts or libraries. I am utilizing Google Analytics, and I was using Lightbox for the images on the homepage. But the script doesn't look good on phones; then I tried another popular alternative that scales well with phones but didn't play well with JQuery, another external script to rely on.
So I did away with that mess altogether. I may implement some nice CSS to showcase the photos if you click on them. Hopefully, by the time you read this, I will have already done so. I've thought about giving each image its own page where folks can vote on them and provide a download link. I haven't made up my mind yet.
The front end of this website doesn't have much content right now, as I spent most of the last few weeks building the backend. I need a robust and flexible admin panel where I can create and edit posts for the blog and for adding AI images to the gallery without having to touch source code on the fly. Most of the features I wanted to implement into this website are in place, although I still have a long way to go before I can accomplish my task. What is that, you're asking?
So I currently have four websites, including FartDump. The other three are self-hosted WordPress sites. Try as I might, I have been unable to speed up those websites. Speed is the key when it comes to websites. I'll use Wisedocks.com for my comparison. Wisedocks is a WordPress site that hosts famous quotes from famous people. The site is behind Cloudflare for security and speed. All the files from that site will load fast as hell, no matter where you are in the world.
The images on the site are offloaded to JetPack, an excellent CDN (Content Delivery Network).
I've spent countless hours optimizing the images before they even hit the internet. And yet, despite my tireless persistence, the site is still kinda slow. In GTmetrix, Wisedocks doesn't look too shabby, but it still takes 3.6 seconds for the website to fully load.
Keep in mind that this is after putting the site behind both Cloudflare and Jetpack and having several optimization plugins. It is pretty tiring to keep up with.
WordPress is so feature-packed that there is no way to get the site faster than I already have without spending a ton of money. WordPress consists of nearly 350,000 lines of code just in the base installation. After adding a few plugins like Jetpack, you are well over 500,000 lines of code.
All of that code has to load before you see the page. Well, quite a bit of it, anyhow. So I decided to simply take the best features of WordPress and build my own software that only incorporates what I need and not the potential needs of millions. I don't need smiley faces and themes to make this site run. I have one smiley and one theme.
That's my smiley, and the theme you see is what you get. If I want to change it, I will have more freedom to do so without worrying about child themes and updates to mess with my code.
The proof is in the pudding. So how does FartDump hold up in GTmetrix, you ask? 0.4 seconds. 381 milliseconds to be exact.
Granted, I still have quite a bit of code to implement myself, and this site isn't the most secure out there. But for you, the viewer, it's fast and reliable since I don't plan to let anyone register on the site. The security problem is only for me to worry about.
Once I get this site functional enough, I can port the software over to my other sites and give them a speed boost that won't cost me a penny. It would be nice to have my site stay with my host and not worry about using CDNs.
Though I'm sure, I will eventually put this site behind a Cloudflare free plan because their security is fantastic. In fact, I may do that now just for security.
You may be thinking, "This site doesn't have any content; that's why it is so fast." But trust me, I've installed WordPress several times now and none of the fresh installs come close to the speeds, this site is getting. In fact, I've been building it live, and it feels like I'm on localhost. So if you need a good CMS, make it yourself; it's faster. Lol.
