Website update 3/8/2021

Todays update has been focussing on improving access speed on the site. This has involved adding caching to the site which I though was on anyway (apparently not), changing the theme to something more lightweight, removing some plugins that were too resource intensive and signing up to a content delivery network. Phew!

You will probably notice that the site now looks far simpler and is a bit less colourful. This is the affect from the change in theme. I do intent to add a bit more colour into the site and redo a lot of the header colours that were present before that this theme seems to have wiped. I do actually appreciate the simplicity of this theme but a splash of colour never hurt anyone!

I’ve also signed the site up for CloudFlare CDN. As this site is currently hosted in the UK there may be speed issues when people from other countries access it. With CDN the site should now (or when the Name servers change over) be cached in a number of different locations making it theoretically quicker for people who don’t live in the UK to access the site.

You may have noticed that the YouTube logo and the Twitter logo have gone from key places around the site. The plugin was unfortunately chewing up a lot of resources on page load. I will be looking at how I can implement links to these in a much better and less resource intensive way in the future!

With the configuration done today (and I don’t think this takes the CDN into account) page load scores have more than doubled and page load times feel much more responsive and snappy. This should help with the site moving forward as Google prefers sites that load faster.

Yesterday I also completed another video about how to use the Parson’s puzzles that are available on the site. Go check it out – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuYSh-QSfRg While you are there please subscribe to the YouTube channel!

This video will be added into the Help section on the Parson’s puzzle pages soon.

Thank you for reading and thank you for your support.