I’m a developer, working on a tool to optimize websites, and make them faster to load.
As you probably know, increasing a site’s speed can lower your bounce rate, boost your SEO rankings, increase user engagement, etc. However, its often very complicated and technically challenging to figure out how to make your site faster.
That’s why I’m working on a tool which would be dead simple - just put in your domain, and get back the link to a new, much faster version of your site. You can then point your domain to the new URL, and from then on, your visitors would see the newer, faster version of the site.
Would something like this interest you guys? I’m very interested in hearing all feedback and ideas.
Yes, I’m targeting content based websites to start off with. Wordpress is the biggest player in that area - and also horrendously slow most of the time.
In terms of how it would work - a lot of your site’s assets are publicly available, can be downloaded, and optimized.
Hope that answers your question!
Do you have any sites whose speed you’d currently like to improve?
Hey @dave1972. I’m not familiar with those plugins in particular - but my experience in general with Wordpress plugins is, they tend to be buggy, insecure, or make the site actually slower.
Have you tried those plugins out? Do they work well for you?
That’s very interesting. I’d love to hear what those miracles are. E.g, are there any specific metrics that they’ve improved? And, would you be open to trying another solution which improves those metrics twice as much?
A tool like you propose would certainly be useful however there are a lot of tools out there that try to do similar things. You have full page caching modules, you have full text search modules which speed up search, you have memory accelerators (Redis, etc), you have javascript / CSS pre-compilers, image minimizers, etc. A new powerful tool would be interesting, but the space is very competitive.
No. I don’t use any CMS, and I take care to optimise my images and my code as I work. I’m just curious as to how your service would work.
Gotcha. As you probably know, a website is made up of lots of components: Images, scripts, stylesheets, etc. My solution would take those publicly available assets, optimize them (using technology we’re building), and put the resulting, faster website back online.
We’ll also host these assets for you, to ensure that they are delivered in the most optimal way as well.
Presumably there would be a fee for using it?
Yes, the pricing model would be similar to a CDN, but I’m considering a free plan for small / low traffic websites, with a ‘Powered by __’ at the bottom.
Perhaps for freelancers / web developers working with clients, there might be a revenue sharing / affiliate program.
Thanks, and you’re right, there is competition. Most of the examples you gave do one thing - but what’s needed is something that combines all of those things, into one solution, plus other things that no one is currently doing. That’s what I’m hoping to build.
