Current homepage is 11Mb and that is not acceptable

Description

The homepage has a nice 11Mb!

11Mb. That translates to 3Mb on mobile.

That is not acceptable, for a variety of reasons:

• that's not just promoting best practices on every metric
• Google doesn't like heavy sites
• We have worldwide customers and I don't know if we have a CDN. If we don't, that means the homepage is SLOW to load in some places.

Proposal

UX:

• Propose a new background image, not made of 150+ individual avatars

Front end:

• Implement new design

There is an MR about it btw: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/2298

@connorshea @luke @jschatz1 @stanhu please advise. I propose to either get rid of the images in the background, or to generate a few static ones.

I think it's that collage that is really big if I remember.

The collage seems unnecessary to me, personally.

Alright. Thanks.

@luke can we imagine getting rid of the collage - as it currently is? A static image would be better, or whatever, but we can't pull 190 images as we do now just to display this.

I've advocated a few times to remove the collage, others have proposed generating the collage on-deploy but the deploy time is already long enough. I'd suggest removing it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can we have @luke make us a nice collage for the background that isn't people's pictures (so it doesn't have to change if someone's picture has to be changed)

added performance label

This has been coming up regularly, so I had created a performance label for that purpose. There is even an MR to optimize the homepage from a contributor https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests?scope=all&state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name%5B%5D=performance.

Thanks @axil Let's make that happen.

changed milestone to %Feb 3, 2017

assigned to @luke

I particularly like the collage... :(

Perhaps we could compress all the photos, and make sure to compress any new one from new team members. That would help...

@marcia

No, because:

• we'd still pull 200+ images for a single page (nightmare)
• we'd compress the images for a few people, then forget about the process and we'll end up in the same situation 6 months from now (FYI 5 months ago the page was 4.5Mb).

Yeah, you're right... I understand @regisF

We could make the background with our icons then (?) Thoughts? cc/ @luke?

@marcia if we like the idea of collage, we can still create a bunch of static background images with random avatars, and choose one randomly. This would give one small image to load, instead of heavy hundreds.

@regisF good idea!

changed milestone to %Make www-gitlab-com better - iteration 1

@regisF totally understand the concern with load time. The original concept was to use GitLab user avatars, not the team, so perhaps we can go that route and create static images. Also explore a few other ideas.

@luke do you have a timeframe in mind for this issue?

I thought i'd have a look at just removing the images & it takes the homepage (locally) down to 1.7mb. I couldn't see anything obvious to get it lower, but it looks like we are loading a lot of different marketing scripts do we really need this many? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/source/includes/layout/footer.html.haml#L74-103

@iamphill Yeah, the first thing step would be to simply remove the images, as we can't have a 11mb page as our homepage (philosophically).

I think we do have Google Tag Manager also that can load a LOT of scripts without our control (from a dev perspective).

Anyway, reducing the page by 90% is already an improvement, let's do that.

Thanks @iamphill for your initiative.

@regisF Ah yeah good point re. tag manager. We should probably have a look what is being added & whether we actually need all of then.

mentioned in merge request !4908 (merged)

@regisF @iamphill I can plan to create a few static images by the end of next week (2/17).

closed via merge request !4908 (merged)

@luke @regisF I've merged !4908 (merged) as a stepping point to get the size down for now whilst we wait for a static image

Will re-open issue to track static image.

reopened

mentioned in commit virtuacreative/www-gitlab-com@58f192b8

Our biggest thing at the moment is caching which we don't seem to do for some reason https://gtmetrix.com/reports/about.gitlab.com/bJhWw26V

@iamphill did we use to do it? Who can help us with this? Infra?

@regisF i don't think we have since the new site, maybe on the old one. Yeah probably infrastructure.

@iamphill but it's a static website. Why would be cache there? By looking at your report, it looks like we don't use browser caching, not caching at the server level.

@regisF the server needs to send the correct caching headers which it doesn't at the moment.

That's now resolved.

closed