Pagespeed optimization at the Dieter Schwarz Foundation

  • Written by Markus Milkereit
  • 3 min
  • Contao CMS Core Web Vitals Pagespeed Web Development

The Dieter Schwarz Foundation supports educational and research projects with a focus on the Heilbronn region. In the summer of 2018, my team and I completely redesigned the foundation's website and have been maintaining it ever since.

We pay particular attention to one important feature when implementing and maintaining websites: the speed of the website, the page speed. Not only because search engines reward fast pages, but above all because a fast-loading website is more pleasant to use - a smooth, frustration-free user experience is an important success factor.

Why should I care about pagespeed?

The DSS website is a good example of a typical modern website: high-resolution images, video content and animations enrich the pages. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to fast Internet; around 20% of all users still have less than 2 MBit available. The proportion of views via smartphones is between 40 and 70%. Pagespeed can fully exploit its advantages, especially with slow and mobile connections.

Without optimization, the website (using the news as an example) is not usable without frustration - even with fast connections.

The non-optimized website is very unwieldy at just under 24 MB and 100 calls. The 2.5 seconds shown here with fast Internet are an unacceptable 47 seconds with slow connections. The rating is correspondingly poor - a full F for "failed" in the US system, school grade 6 (source: GTMetrix).

Optimization in three steps

We optimize the website using three basic building blocks of modern web development:

  • Basic optimization via settings within the Contao CMS and good, fast hosting on our business servers
  • Images are optimized for all typical device classes via Contao image rules
  • We round off the pagespeed by using our contao-pagespeed and contao-tinypng extensions and intelligently reducing the required code
By drastically reducing the file size to around 450kB and the number of hits to 50, the loading time with a fast connection is more than halved. Due to the small size, the effect is even better with slow connections: instead of 47 seconds, the page loads in 5 seconds. (Source: GTMetrix)

There are numerous other optimization options that we have presented in lectures on the topic of pagespeed - in most cases, however, we have already reached the sweet spot here: massive improvements in the number of views and the download size of the website.