I must say I'm impressed with the performance of this website. This site is built with the Articulate blog plugin and it’s resting on Umbraco Cloud.

Sure it’s not a design heavy site but I’m still impressed with the performance measurements I get on this site using gtmetrix.com and lighthouse especially when looking at the server-side results such as TTFB (Time to first byte), Connection and Backend Duration.

I often use gtmetrix.com for work whenever I’m troubleshooting or trying to improve the performance of one of my clients sites but I’ve never been able to get a perfect score (100%). I’m usually satisfied as long as I get at least 80-90% depending on how heavy the site is so I was very happy when this site got 99%!

I didn’t get it out of the box, I did some tweaking myself to improve the score. However just from installing Articulate on top of Umbraco Cloud gave me something like 90%, so there wasn’t a lot of work I had to do actually to improve the score besides some caching, qzip compression and reduce unused javascript.

The only thing I haven’t done which maybe could give me that last 1% is serve my images through a CDN, but for now I’m happy with my results. Chasing that last 1% is probably one of those things that could drive me crazy if I start digging too much so I thought I wouldn’t open that box for my own mental health’s sake.

I’m aware that measured performance and actual performance are two different things, for instance I have no idea how this site would behave under really heavy traffic (and I probably never will) but it was nice to see such a high score without having to do a whole lot of work really.

I also got a really high SEO score out of the box, thanks to the Articulate plugin, but that’s another blog post.