Hey, how about a do over?

Our friend Jody Ferry recently compiled

a review of Philadelphia based agency websites and how they adapted to a mobile view. He ranked them according to their page weight as measured by a tool on Pingdom. We were surprised and sad to see Happy Cog listed in the middle of the pack at around 1.6mb. After some quick investigation we found two culprits: big PNG files and a heavy Typekit package.

The images were used to display work from previous projects. Loading them cost 1.019mb (1019kb) so we quickly re-optimized the images from the originals. Saving to JPEG which reduced the file size for each image considerably. We gained even more reduction in weight by using the apps

JPEG Mini and ImageOptim. In the end we went from 1019kb to 484kb (53% savings), without sacrificing any quality. That’s over half a megabyte of data that we saved.

First Row: Original PNG files. Second Row: JPG files saved at 80 quality. Third Row: JPEGs after being run through JPEGMini. Last Row: JPEG’s run through ImageOptim.

We recently redesigned our site to include new typefaces. After conducting an audit of the entire site we found a small, but important area of improvement. We were pulling in font weights that were used sparingly. A quick change from one type weight to another helped us reduce our Typekit package from 290kb to 212kb.

In the end, we started with a page weight 1.6mb and got down to approximately ~960kb, shaving 1/3rd of our page weight.

So we’d like a do-over. With our site adjustments, we think Happy Cog will be closer to the top of the list.

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