Initial page load is slow (middleman + heroku)

#1

Hi everyone, I recently deployed my first middleman site, hosted on Heroku, and the initial page load seems really slow to me. About 4-5 seconds, long enough to think the site is broken. I’m not sure what’s wrong; or if this is just something that comes with the territory. Right now, my project is just the skeleton app that gets created when you run “middleman init”, plus the blogging extension and associated files, plus a Rakefile and config.ru for deploying (I followed the instructions here for deploying to heroku).

I searched a bit on the forums and SO and didn’t find anything; apologies if this question has been asked before.

Here’s the site: http://www.alicedash.com/
Here’s the source: https://github.com/yaliceme/Alice-Dash

Thanks very much for any help or pointers!

#2

Hi @yaliceme. Middleman is extremely fast, all static as you know so if the site isn’t running roughly at the same speed as it is locally it’s probably the server. With Heroku if you’re using one of their free plans slow loads will be the norm. Because you’re sites are all static you may want to consider throwing everything up on a CDN that offers serving the whole site like Amazon or Cachefly.

#3

Heroku doesn’t seem like the right platform for a middleman site. You can use something like github pages to speed up the site if you know the basics of git.

#4

Thanks @dikaio and @minhajuddin for the replies, I’ll look into the platforms you suggest. I’ve known others to host Middleman sites with Heroku, with fast page loads, but perhaps they’re using one of the paid plans.

EDIT: just to close the loop, I switched to hosting on GitHub pages, and it was much much faster. Thank you! I mostly used this Sitepoint tutorial for getting it hosted on GitHub pages with a custom URL. I got an error during the git push --set-upstream origin source step, so I used this other article for sitting up the git repo, and it worked fine.