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How I Halved My Load Time Using Flying Scripts

August 2,

Website Speeds - The Problem

The bane of any web designers day is getting the elusive green scores in GTMetrix. You can have a optimised website with green lights in all areas, on a super fast host, but your time to loading is around 4-5 seconds. What gives?

It's those damn JavaScript files! The issue is that, when a browser is loading all the little files that make up a page, it'll 'unpack' them as they are received. This can create slow loading websites, and to rub it in further, its normally non-essential scripts that aren't needed for your website to function (EG, Google Analytics, Stripe.js, YouTube, Google Maps).

So what can be done?

Well we can defer the files, so they 'unpack' after the page loads. This makes for a smoother experience for your users, but you still have long page load times in Google and GT Metrix. This isn't great for SEO in a world where page speed really matters.

Enter Flying Scripts

Flying Scripts is different, because the files are downloaded, but they are not 'unpacked' by the browser until the user interacts with the website in some way. This means that those multiple analytics and tracking scripts that do not add to the function of the page, do not load until they are called upon by a user.


A Real World Example of Speed Savings

So I did a beautiful website for Need to Pass Quick, a driving agency in the UK, using Oxygen. It outputs clean code, but you can see that the load time was nearly 5.5 seconds for the homepage, despite being hosted on Cloudways and cached through Cloudflare.

Before Flying Scripts

Load time of 5.4 seconds

With Flying Scripts

Load time of 2.9 seconds! That's a saving of 2.5 seconds!
Remember - I have performed no other tricks or optimisations - just installed and configured Flying Scripts!

So as you can see, Flying Scripts works amazingly well and is very simple to use. All you do, is enter the JS files you wish to load through the plugin, and it does the rest. In my example above, I added the Google Analytics and Stripe JS files, since they are for tracking and security checks only. These two scripts made such an enormous difference to my website load time!


I definitely recommend the plugin! Let me know how you get on and how much time to you save!

I'm a UI / UX Designer living in Sheffield. I have a real passion for everything digital, movies and motorbikes.

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