Have you noticed? We’re 38% faster!

A few weeks ago, we asked our users what they would like to see improved on start.me. A “faster start.me” came out as a big priority for our users, so we made it a big priority too! Today we launched a new version of start.me that should make it load faster for you. In this blog post we’ll explain what we’ve done how much faster start.me has become.

What have we done?

First of all, the (perceived) loading speed of start.me is different for every individual user and partly depends on factors that we cannot control. For example: if you are located in a country far away from our servers, on a slow internet connection and on an old computer, start.me is likely to load more slowly for you.

What we can control is the performance of our web app. Without going into too much technical details, we have implemented the following optimizations:

• Reduced overall size of our web app, including the size of our JavaScript + CSS Bundles
• Implemented more code-splitting to ensure code only gets loaded when it is used
• Moved custom bookmark icons to a more efficient sub-application (f.start.me)
• Added lazy loading for images

What’s the result of all this?

In the below charts you’ll see a comparison of performance data of a start.me page before and after our optimizations were applied. You’ll see that we’ve been able to reduce the total (unzipped) size of our app by 12,7%. This reduces the amount of bytes that need to be transferred over the network.

In the above chart you can also see that we have reduced the main Javascript bundle size by 22.27%. This is important because it means your computer has less (Javascript) code to process when it is rendering your startpage. As a result of this, the “First Contentful Paint” improved by 54.55% and the “Time To Interactive*” improved by 37.66%.

*The Time to Interactive is the amount of time in which it takes for the content on a page to become functional and ready for the user to interact with once the content has stabilized. We consider this the most important KPI and we’re glad that we have been able to improve it by 38%!

Have you noticed?

More important than the above statistics – which are based on averages – is whether you noticed an actual improvement in the loading speed of your startpage. Please let us know in the comments below, or e-mail us at support@start.me.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to make improvements to the start.me loading speed. We will let you know when we make significant progress in this area.