Absolutely new to this, please help, site slow

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi All,

I have just found this amazing site and wonder if anyone could help me interpret the results. Website optimisation is not usually my remit so please be gentle… :wink:

Attached are the results of a test I am running on our site.
It is externally hosted and managed and we have just released a new version of the site which is running incredibly slow (typically 5-6 seconds for a revisited page.

The hosts/designers claim its the images/content that are causing the site to run slow but the repeat load waterfall seems to suggest that there is other stuff going on in the background that is causing the site to run slow (thing like verisign, whoson (live chat client) and fast.fonts font substitution).

What would you experts think? Any responses very, very much appreciated.

2

Do you actually get any real benefit from having the verisign seal on your page? I’m honestly curious because it always seemed like sites were basically providing free marketing for them by putting the seals on their pages (and yes, that is slowing things down but it may not be all that user-visible).

The fonts should not be loaded over https (and the css should be cached). It’s possible that the caching will be fixed automatically when they aren’t loaded over https but loading resources over https for a non-secure site is pretty much wasting time (the purple bars are the extra time it takes to negotiate the secure connections).

Same goes for the whoson.com javascript. It should be cacheable and not loaded over ssl.

Any chance you can share the link to the full test results? It would be interesting to see how the designers did for the first view page loads.

3

Thankyou very much for the reply sir!

Sorry again about the dupe and missing the post about approval! :slight_smile:

Anyhow, I will feed this back to them (our hosts) and see their response, thankyou very much for your feedback.

The link to the results is,

Thanks very much

4

So, they are also partially correct. Compressing the photos a bit better can conservatively cut the size of the page in half without any visual impact - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120817_6T_CAF/1/performance_optimization/#compress_images

For users who come back and see the same content again those will be cached but there is a lot of room for improvement just by saving at quality level 75 (85 if you want to be super-conservative with them). In Photoshop it’s the equivalent of “save for web” quality level 50-60.

They aren’t completely off the hook either. 150KB of compressed javascript is pretty enormous.

They could also make the whole thing load and feel faster if they only loaded the first image in the carousel with the page itself and then loaded the other images after the page itself loaded (and before kicking in the animation).