Concrete Ideas

Concrete Ideas wanted to reduce the page load time of their website. Their initial page load time ranged from 3 seconds to 12 seconds with average of more than 5 seconds. After looking at the site, we assured them that we can decrease the worst page load time to within 4 seconds. At the end of the project, the average page load time was less than 2 seconds.

The website had some low-hanging fruits which we could solve pretty easily. It ran on VPS which would freeze the site every time memory usage exceeded their RAM. We moved the site to Rackspace cloud server so that even if memory usage increased beyond available RAM, the system still uses swap memory. We also noticed that the website used Apache web server which uses lots of memory. We replaced it by Nginx which uses less memory and is much faster.

Most of the visitors to the website are anonymous visitors. So we installed Varnish reverse proxy in front of nginx web server so that anonymous visitors would get cached content from Varnish. But there was one problem. The website uses visitor's IP address to tell the visitor the number of concrete companies in his area. Since this number depends on individual user, Varnish can't cache that page. So we converted that block to AJAX. Now the Varnish could cache the full page. Whenever the page would load, javascript would query the server which will identify the user's location and respond with the number of companies in his area.

The client was so happy with our work that we are working with them on optimizing their other websites.