First of all, happy new year to everyone! We hope you had a safe and enjoyable holiday period and celebrated the New Year in style.
As part of our efforts to deliver a reliable and fast website, we have moved to a brand new server. There were several reasons why we opted to do this and the main factors were reliability and speed. We were experiencing regular downtime – up to several hours sometimes – and the site was not running at the speed we desired.
Therefore the entire site – along with almost 9 years of content and 50,000+ images – was moved! It took a long time to ensure it was working properly and then we finally flipped the switch. We are closely monitoring the new server to keep an eye out for any issues, so if something seems odd then let us know. We’d also love to hear about whether you think the site is faster, about the same, or (hopefully not) slower.
In order to improve the speed of the website, so that you can get the content you want faster, we have implemented some new features.
- LazyLoad has been implemented for images. Now images only download when you need them, whereas before they would all download before the page loaded.
- A new cache tool has been utilised to increase the speed of page loads.
- Various plugins that the site relied on have been disabled.
- The database has been optimised and redundant data has been removed.
- And more!
In short, this new shiny server should solve all of the problems that we noticed, and that some of you reported to us.
As we head into the future, we have some exciting plans that we’re going to trial this year which means new content, returning old content, new ways of doing things and various changes. It’s going to be an exciting year!
Thanks for your support, here’s to 2016!