Performance Audit for Your Website

by Bruno Meilick, 2024-08-08

Read time 2 minutes

Optimize your website with expert performance audits by Bruno Meilick. Certified Kirby CMS partner, offering detailed audits, code reviews and refactors.

What will the Audit include?

The audit I offer is split into examining the status quo with hints on how to solve them and three optional packages: code review, code refactoring and server configuration.

List of Issues and Hints

Based on the automated reports, I will compile a list of issues that need to be addressed and prioritize them. In contrast to the single pass report featured on this website, which are analyzing only the homepage, when doing an audit I will do a multi-pass report including tests for subpages.

For each issue, I will note down where it appeared and add hints on how to solve them. The list might include anything from pointing out which part of your setup is causing the issue, from project structure, amount of resources, and image loading to optimising your web server's settings and more.

The final list will be the first part of a written document you will receive as a shareable link and PDF. The link to the automated report generated by Webpagetest will also be included, and the baseline scores will be defined.

Code Review

Given access to your website source code, I can check for best practices and generate a list of changes that need to be made. The list will flag issues with priority, reason, cost/time estimation and a reference to the source code file and line where possible.

The code review will include things like:

Analysis of the number of resources, their size, and the number of referenced page objects on your templates to spot performance bottlenecks.
Inspection of the order of the head-element and resource priority as shown in the waterfall diagram.
Pointing out where images are referenced, thumbs created and how they could be optimized.
Show where most of the time is spent building menus, filters, or querying collections.
Marking places in the code where caching could be applied.
Check Kirby's configuration parameters and suggest changes to improve speed and security.
Adding Content Security Policies.
Running static analysis on your code to detect unexpected behaviour.
Noting plain malformed code document structure or unused variable or unreachable code.
Flag uncaught null-cases that could trigger exceptions.
...

Code Refactor

There is a limit of how much I can do within the fixed budget. Given the code review, we can either prioritize and keep the changes done within that budget – which will still make your website much faster – or define a new budget together in case we need to address more challenging tasks.

Before I change any line of code, you will know which ones, why, and how long it will take me. After I am done, the changes made will be traceable, assuming we will be using an online code repository like Github or Gitlab. You will receive PRs from me grouping individual commits reasonably, like
CACHING/add-caching-to-global-menu or
BUG/fix-missing-snippet-parameter.

Server Configuration

Many of the changes needed to optimize the server setup can be made within your website's code and are part of the code refactor phase. For some issues I would need access to your hosting account or work together with your IT service.

While most hosting providers have sane defaults, fine-tuning can be applied to the server configuration. There is no magic happening here; it's mostly a matter of knowing how to implement the changes suggested by the automated reports in the admin dashboard and your Apache or Nginx config files.

Some examples:

Public folder setup and secure storage of environment secrets
Proper redirecting of www/non-www domains and enforcing HTTPS
Caching / Expiration rules for resources
Blocking malicious attempts

Show, not tell

I compiled an albeit simplified example audit to illustrate this process better. Most websites I have optimized had more serious performance issues. Feel free to visit it now and return later.

Read the Example Audit