All A ratings but loadtime is 3-4 seconds

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hey all!

During the last few days I was getting into server administration… I think.

Well, what really bothers me, is that I somehow seem to be unable to reduce page loadtime. Also I would love to shrink images even moe, but then quality starts to look crappy to be honest.

My website runs on a VPS with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 v3 @ 2.30GHz with 8 cores, 24GB RAM and 320 SSD

Ubuntu 14.04
nginx 1.8.0
PHP 5.6.13-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+3
Redis server 3.0.4
ngx_pagespeed
MariaDB 10.0.21-MariaDB-1~trusty-log

System-wise I’d say: this has got to be running like crazy…

But still my tiny website needs 3-4 seconds to load, depending on test server location. I get 3.3-4s from GTMetrix testserver which is located in Canada.
and 3.8 sec from WebPagetest with server location Frankfurt here in Germany where my site is hosted as well.

Please have a look at my test results

I am clueless on how to improve loadtime… and I’d appreciate your help!

Thanks for reading this and taking time to look at my results :slight_smile:

Looking forward to hear your tipps and tricks!

2

A lot of js, a lot of fonts, and maybe this tool could help you:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.saskialund.de/VECb4hIW

sometimes fixing HTML could help too:

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.saskialund.de%2F

and this is basic:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.saskialund.de

Have a nice day.

3

Hi grupo!
Thanks for your answer.

As I stated in my entry post, I was testing via gtmetrix constantly while trying to optimize my site.
Lots of js is kind of… “normal” for a wordpress website relying on jquery… using a slider… some plugins like jetpack and Yoast SEO etc.
Those plugins add elements to the dom, like those extra title tags, that your html investigation tool spit out f.e.

What do you mean by “tons of fonts”? I am using 1 single font on my site, which is “Lato” and I am only serving 3 font weights: 400, 700 and 900 and not even any italic versions or anything, and I even serve it via my own nginx… to save extra http requests that would happen if I served them via google’s font servers… especially because nginx is great at serving static files.

The renderblocking script that is inside of the combined js files, which you see in that pagespeed report, is jquery core script.
Can’t defer it, because it is called relatively early in the dom. I am not the only one having this problem :frowning:
Ad I have no idea to solve it, to be honest… which is why … I was asking in this forum. Hoping some of the smart people around here had an idea or a tipp.

About your html advice: thanks for that :slight_smile:
I will look into the html and see if I can fix the theme developer’s mistakes… I already sent them a message about two months ago whe I found lots of css mistakes and other php related code mistakes. They fixed most of it in their latest update using the fixes I sent them.
But obviously I need to check that theme a bit more. had set this aside, because all was working fine… and I didnt check it any further.

Google pagespeed insights is also bookmarked over here, my friend :wink: As you said… basic :smiley:
I just implemented ngx_pagespeed module using those nice pagespeed filters for image optimization and such. I wonder why I am getting n/a response though at that webpagetest.

Well, the thing is, I am really frustrated because I can’t get the entire thing to load in 1 second. This should be possible without a doubt.
Today I managed to get a 1.2 secs loadtime from gtmetrix. But that was london based testserver… not the canadian standard one.

Will try with finxing html errors for now and let you know if it helps anything

4

Ok I managed to get loadtime down to 1.3 secs!
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.saskialund.de/4ct5AkMX

I was able to fix all of the html code errors that were marked by the w3 validator. Will submit my fixes to the dev team of that theme.

Is there anything else I could do to get an even better rating?

5

You can improve a lot of things, it depends on how far you want to go, all the standards have rules you have to skip for convenience, for example, i can easily fix the render blocking javascript here:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.grupoalianzaempresarial.com&tab=mobile

68% WTF!!! hahaha

But i don’t want to fix this issue because this “issue”, help users to catch the most part of the website (more than 90%), the cache in this case give a great user experience, the first page maybe loads in 1.2s:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.grupoalianzaempresarial.com/2gjwlljk

but when the user navigate the website the transitions occur in less than 0.4s even if you have a slow browser you display the next page like it loads instantly, maybe loads in 0.2s or 0.4s, but display the entire page, don’t display element by element, i do this for two reasons, most of my visitors came from LATAM, where all the browsers are old and the connections are toooooo slow… you can visit all my sites in IE6, i hate this, but is LATAM; or some of my customers use satellite connection that sometimes is worst than dial up…

In all the cases I prefer don’t use frameworks, all the frameworks have a lot of functions you never use, is the case of jquery, a blog is simple to code, you can develop a simple blog easy to mantain, I developed this in less than a day:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fvisitusa.mx%2F&tab=mobile

This blog have a couple of errors, in this moment I’m not using a CDN because a lot of CDN’s block a lot of false positives, or I don’t put image sizes because are responsive images, I can easily develop a function for the image sizes, but affects the server load and the user experience, in this cases is when i love to skip some rules:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/visitusa.mx/bkiZKQf0

even if you develop more complex solutions you can use your own code, you choose how far you want to go, for example in ecommerce:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tususcripcion.com&tab=mobile

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.tususcripcion.com/gV0VsjCK

You have to choose if you want to dedicate time to develop your own solutions or use open source, the opens source is an easy way to implement scalable soulutions, but have a lot of errors and disadvantages, some projects maybe need an easy solution, but some projects deserve a better treat.

The scalability sometimes is hard but you have better results, the ngx_pagespeed could help you, but have a lot of bugs, develop your own solutions kills ngx_pagespeed, an easiest way to hack all the standrads, *meters, etc. is to put a big vector/text above the fold, it loads instantly when the user scroll, your website was fully loaded, maybe some day i take this solution, but i’m the worst designer ever, and i don’t want to design a vector every time I post something, but maybe a solution could be make generic vectors.

6

Thanks for explaining your thoughts on the matter, grupo!

Your custom blog solution looks interesting. :slight_smile:

In fact I would code my own “Blog” if it was necessary, too. However, most of the times, my customers request a ton of different functionalities, where it is out of the scope of a simple blogging platform. At this point WordPress comes in really handy, because it is versatile and as you said scalable.
It is first and foremost a very easy to cope with CMS solution for non-techie people - which is the majority of my clients :smiley:

I decided to use a premade WordPress Theme for my own website, because I am planning to extend the current simple Blog to a shopping platform for virtual items like plugins customized for the german WordPress needs…
WordPress allows me to implement a shop and any kind of functionality without any big hassle. And at the same time it is totally versatile.
And secondly I decided to use a premade Theme with WP, because I simply liked the design :smiley:

And yes you are right, one does not HAVE to fix all those issues that Webpage Speed Tests wanker about. Especially not if you have implemented certain solutions to improve user experiences on your site.
It just “feels” better if Google Insights likes my site somehow… lol.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.saskialund.de&tab=mobile

I thank you very much for the time you took to write your answer! And I am glad, that the majority of my clients and page visitors is past using IE6, 7 and 8 :smiley: Thus I dont even support those old Browsers anymore… It is also a security risk using them! People should be encouraged to update their software… really it irresponsible to use such old ms windows stuff. XD

7

You can see the problems that external files cause to your spdy setup, breaking the link. If you can get all of your local files downloaded in one go ( excepting the favicons… ), that’ll help, and your site will only be slowed by external stuff at the end. I don’t know if there’s a pagespeed directive to do that?

It might be interesting to run a few tests at full speed, just to see what is slowed by the content ( 800KB ) being shown over cable bandwidth, and what you can possibly tune out on the server.

Finally, nginx have just released 1.9.5. As you’re probably building from scratch to get pagespeed running, you might want to upgrade to that, and run their slightly restricted version of http/2 instead of spdy.