I am a Bunny.net fan as they offer a CDN at a good price, are based in Europe and really care about privacy. The latest tool they offer: Bunny Fonts as a replacement for Google Fonts, because its use is illegal in Germany. 👍

Yesterday and today I worked very hard on making my blog faster. In the Google Search Console I saw that my blog suddenly gets half as many clicks since a few days and that my pages are only “moderately” fast. I don’t really care about the number of clicks, but I do want the site to be fast. PageSpeed Insights also showed me that the time until the “First Contentful Paint” seems to be longer than a second for many users (and it has to be under a second for it to be considered fast).

I have taken the following measures:

• Optimized HTML and CSS
• Embedded CSS in HTML to reduce the critical path and the number of requests
• Reduced the CNAME chain
• Enabled the BunnyCDN Origin Shield (this probably has the greatest effect - especially for requests from the other side of the world)

With Fast or Slow my blog now reaches 100% in every category. Hopefully Google will soon notice that the site is now much faster.

I use BunnyCDN as storage for my Micropub media endpoint, where I upload all the photos and other media files I publish on my blog. When I upload a new photo the media endpoint first uploads the original file with the name of it’s SHA-256 hash value (so when I upload the same file multiple times, it doesn’t create multiple files). When I upload an image (JPEG or PNG) it also gets optimized and resized to a maximum width of 2000 pixels using the Tinify API (and then uploaded to BunnyCDN too), doing that significantly reduces the file size of the images displayed on my blog.

It would be probably awesome to also serve different formats based on the Accept HTTP header (WebP for browsers that support it) or different sizes, but I decided I want to hold my perfectionism (and the complexity) in check and settle for using just one optimized file version in the original file format. If at some point all browsers support WebP, I might consider using only WebP files, but until then it still takes time.

At the moment I don’t backup the files from BunnyCDN (I trust that they - or I - don’t accidentally delete them), but I could probably setup a cron job to regularly copy new files via FTP from their storage to another storage.