The site saw a pretty large spike of traffic (we’re not talking Reddit or Hacker News scale, but still significant). The results exceeded my expectations.
The Nitty Gritty Details
I was confident that my site would do well under significant traffic, but you never know. It would have been quite ironic if an article showcasing a high-performance WordPress theme breaks that very theme. The actual numbers were amazing.
Globally, pages loaded at an average time of 1.73 seconds with ~55.9% of page requests loading in one second or less and ~90.7% of page requests loading in 3 seconds of less.
U.S. traffic was even more impressive. Pages loaded at an average time of 0.94 seconds. ~75.1% of page requests loaded in one second or less and ~94.1% of page requests loaded in 3 seconds or less. Not shabby.
The thing that interested me the most was the server bandwidth load.
At its max, the server was sending ~91.9 KB/sec and was averaging only ~18.2 KB/sec. Those numbers wouldn’t max out my home DSL upload speed.
It’s only fair to mention that a lot of this was due to ample server caching and and a great web hosting service. But a lot of these numbers are due to Frank—I couldn’t be happier.
Why Frank Matters
Blogging is ultimately about sharing ideas with the world. We have tacked on a bunch of superfluous additives to the medium, but when boiled down, it’s still about sharing. The more weight we add to our blogging platforms, the more we get in the way of sharing – both from the writer’s and reader’s perspective. Frank was created to remove those barriers so that writers could rely on a performant blog (even on a low cost web host) and so readers weren’t forced to wait for a site to load just to wade through excess. Publishers shouldn’t have to purchase expensive web hosting plans and/or CDNs to share their ideas with a large audience. The process of sharing is what makes the Internet so unique. I wanted Frank to support that process.
Help Us Out
Frank is in a good place, but there’s still a lot to do. I am committed to continuing to improve Frank, but I could really use your help. The best way to contribute is to use the theme and either log issues for bugs and feature requests. The other way to help out is to fork Frank and take on some open issues.
The coming weeks should see a lot of improvements to Frank. I will soon begin the process of creation automation tools for developers. I am planning on making another big optimization pass on the CSS with a goal to drop the CSS file size by 5-10 percent. I want Frank to be the poster-child of performant WordPress. If you’d like to help, I would be grateful.