Three days ago, this site weighed in at about 1.1 megabytes. Not the end of the world, but not keeping with a lighter internet and a shared responsibility for reduced server energy demand. It’s now just under 600 kilobytes, so quicker loading and better for your data plan.
Here’s what I did:
- I think I have removed all my trackers.
- Downgraded the “hero image” of the Jersey Universalist Church — though it now has a lot of artifacts (visual static) and it is still 100 kilobytes by itself. I should see if I can find an attractive theme without the hero image feature.
- Removed the large version of my photo from the bottom of the page.
- Hid large images below a “more” fold.
- Disabled the Jetpack plugin. Now I don’t see where people come from or what article drew them in. (Though the answer is almost always, “the United States” and “anything controversial about the UUA.”)
- Turned off Gravatars in the comments. I’m the only one who uses them, and my picture is already at the top of the page.
So now my site is more private, for you, too. Not sure if I’ll keep to all these reductions, and I might add more because those changes were those I could do quickly. Though if you really want to see a page fly, visit my Universalist Christian Initiative site, built in Jekyll with no images and a whisper-thin 16 kilobyte download.