I’ve been writing about my efforts to make my site load faster. Read Part 1 here.

But like that young Jedi so long ago, I was not always able to levitate the ship out of the swamp. Probably because I didn’t believe enough.

Either, way, here are some methods that I tried and ended up not using.

###What was a wash

• Lazy loading or concatenating my javascript and didn’t make much of a difference. Likely because my concatenated scripts are only 18K.
• Paying extra for CDN web hosting. My time to first byte varies widely, from as... More

A few years ago, I made a key lime pie for a party. One of my friends was raving about it. “Oh my God. You have to give me the recipe.”

“Well,” I said. “There’s no secret. It’s the recipe on the key lime juice bottle.”

This is sort of how I feel about my web optimization efforts. Smart people at Filament Group and Google and elsewhere have already figured it out. Just follow the recipe.

If it was that easy, we’d all be Gordon Ramsay. Err, maybe not.

But, like with pie, experience has taught... More