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Ask HN: How do I hire someone to make my site faster?
I run a couple of sites that I'd like to speed up but know nothing about CDN and other technical things. How would you go about hiring someone who could help with this? Or are there any services I can use?
- samlev 15y agoYour first step is to look at a few simple tools that could give you ways to get perceived (and actual) speed-ups. These are your low hanging fruit, before spending time (and money) on infrastructure upgrades. Look for a 'YSlow' plugin for your chosen browser (they exist for Chrome and Firefox), which can help you to identify things that are causing your site to appear slow. After that, then I would look at CDN, and then I would look at database optimisation (many people just don't "get" indexes, and don't understand how much of a difference they can make), and finally code optimisation.
- sixQuarks 15y agoThat's good advice, but that's what I need help with. I don't know how to look into database optimization, CDN, etc. Where should I go to find someone to help? Are there forums, or services that do this?
- SHOwnsYou 15y agoAnytime I need to figure out how to dig deeper into a technical problem, I start with http://stackoverflow http://stackoverflow. A lot of questions like yours have already been asked with hundreds of great responses. Just spend an hour searching around for database indexing, using a CDN, and writing better sql queries and you'll have pages and pages of invaluable information at your fingertips.
- samlev 15y agoYou could probably hire a free-lancer to get most of this stuff going for you (there are plenty of sites around for hiring people to do small jobs). Ultimately, though, you should look at trying to do as much as you can yourself. The better you understand your system, the better you can run your company. Still, CDN and database optimisation isn't the first place to start. As I mentioned, look at YSlow, which should give you a few places to work on for optimising your sites. As mentioned by someone else, depending on the technology your sites are running on, there may also be plugins/tools available to speed things up with little to no real effort.
- dangrossman 15y agoDo these sites use a prebuilt CMS? Most have a cache plugin, and if you're not doing any caching of mostly-static pages, that'll probably fix all your problems instantly.
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoBefore doing anything clever/expensive, why don't you try CloudFlare?
- drKarl 15y agoI didn't know about CloudFare, thank you!!
- noahc 15y agoEmail me noah@noahc.net the URL and the reason why you're trying to make it faster. I'll take a look at it and get back to you with the low hanging fruit.