Smaller Pages and Fewer Requests on Every Template
A pass over every design in the catalog for weight and request count. The typical page is now around a fifth of what it was.
The numbers
Measured on a representative site with a headshot, a reel, twelve gallery images and fifteen credits, on a mid-range phone over a normal mobile connection:
- Initial page weight: 2.9 megabytes down to 480 kilobytes.
- Requests before first paint: 38 down to 9.
- Time to first meaningful content: 4.8 seconds down to 1.1.
- Time to interactive: 7.2 seconds down to 1.9.
What produced it
No single change. Four, each covered separately:
- Images. Modern formats, loading on scroll and a delivery network. This was the largest single contribution by a wide margin.
- Stylesheets. Assembled per site rather than shipped whole, in faster stylesheets.
- Fonts. Fewer weights, better serving, in web fonts from a CDN.
- Scripts. Third-party embeds no longer load until somebody interacts with them, which is the change behind the video gallery rebuild.
Why this matters for an actor specifically
Two reasons, and the second is the important one.
Speed is a ranking signal, so a faster site is marginally easier to find. That is real and it is small.
The larger effect is that people leave. A visitor who waits five seconds mostly does not wait five seconds, and the visits you can least afford to lose are exactly the ones most likely to be on a phone on a bad connection: somebody checking you between meetings, on a train, in a stairwell outside a casting session.
Nothing to do
Every existing site got this. If your site felt slow a year ago it is worth looking again.
The one thing still under your control is what you upload. A 40 megapixel headshot is handled correctly, as described in automatic image resizing, but a page with thirty photographs on it is still a page with thirty photographs on it. Curation is covered in photo categories.
Create a free actor website and it will be fast from the start.
