I hate to admit it but I love it

After a lot of research and moments of angst and trepidation…. I downloaded and installed Jetpack.

I read many horror stories from the past but apparently things have been worked on and improved.

I am starting an insurance agency so funds are tight and I can’t afford big cdn’s like Max CDN.

While I’m not a developer, I am an ex IT admin so I know the importance of page speed for google and bing placement.

I had been experiencing page speed average of between 4.95 second up to 13 seconds. I just had too many requests.

I found out about Cloudflare and their free CDN and free SSL served from the CDN to the client page….

I got that working after about a month of trial and error.
I then installed W3 Total Cache and between the two that knocked my page speed tests down to about 4.25 but I was still averaging between 60-90 requests.

I took a chance and installed jetpack just for the Photon image “CDN” and now I’m finally at fantastic load times. Page Speed and Yslow have been averaging around 1.75 seconds and on pingdom I’ve been tested as low as 850ms.

I don’t have a huge website footprint like Facebook or Yahoo or ESP, but it’s fairly large but now I’m down to 28-3 requests and at 850ms, Pingdom says I’m testing faster than 97% of their tested sites. I can’t complain about that I don’t think. Now I just need to spend a little bit of money for Google/Bing and Yahoo adds and finish my yelp and Merchant Circle and Facebook pages and I might just start getting somewhere.

I’m happy happy happy.

Oh and just an update… I’ve been running Cloudflare minify and rocketloader for 2 days now and Photon is holding strong. It would seem that you guys have been doing a lot of work in the last year or two!!!!!

Thank you very much folks!