I took my site down from well over 400 images to 46 images, then I used Photoshop to save them all to web format in the smallest size that still looked good (most were medium jpegs) and now my compressed images score is still a “D”. How can that be? Also, after the change, my compress text score got worse…what am I missing?
It looks like your automatic thumbnail generator is at fault. It is taking in jpeg images and generating png thumbnails that are pretty big. You should look at the thumb.php code and have it output a reasonably compressed jpeg instead.
FAILED (59.1 KB, target = 13.3 KB - savings of 45.8 KB - Convert PNG to 8 bit)- http://jupiterflhomes.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fjupiterflhomes.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F04%2FAbacoa-Valencia-Home-For-Sale.jpg&w=175&h=125&zc=1&q=100
FAILED (45.9 KB, target = 9.8 KB - savings of 36.1 KB - Convert PNG to 8 bit)- http://jupiterflhomes.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fjupiterflhomes.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F04%2FTuscany-at-Abacoa-Homes-For-Sale.jpg&w=175&h=125&zc=1&q=100
FAILED (42.0 KB, target = 9.4 KB - savings of 32.5 KB - Convert PNG to 8 bit)- http://jupiterflhomes.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fjupiterflhomes.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F04%2FAbacoa-Town-Center.jpg&w=175&h=125&zc=1&q=100
FAILED (42.5 KB, target = 10.3 KB - savings of 32.1 KB - Convert PNG to 8 bit)- http://jupiterflhomes.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_17/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fjupiterflhomes.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2010%2F05%2FValencia-at-Abacoa-Homes-For-Sale.jpg&w=175&h=125&zc=1&q=100
For gzip, it looks like your combined css and js files are not being compressed:
FAILED (25.4 KB, compressed = 8.8 KB - savings of 16.6 KB) - http://idx-cdn.assets.diversesolutions.com/combo-js/config=wordpress-idx.js/f7fa9d
FAILED (12.4 KB, compressed = 3.2 KB - savings of 9.3 KB) - http://idx-cdn.assets.diversesolutions.com/combo-css/config=wordpress-idx.css/7bcfab
Patrick, thanks I will look into fixing the thumbnail generator. As far as gzip, the diverse solution IDX is my real estate plugin that is the most important part of my site…does it matter that it is a 3rd party item or is this something I can still fix on my end?
If you have comfortable editing code and know what you are doing you can do it, if not consult the plug-in creators
Looks like it is being served from their CDN - you should be able to just ask them to fix it.
This is the response I got from Diverse Solution customer serve, the provider of my third party paid plugin that puts mls listings on my site:
"we do actually save a gzip’ed (compressed) version to our CDN, but because of the nature of our CDN we have to save it as a slightly different URL, therefore we would have to decide on page request if the client could handle a gzip response or not. This is something we do now on our dsSearchAgent, but not something we integrated into the dsIDXpress PHP/wordpress plugin -YET- but it’s something I’ll definitely make sure is on our roadmap, since it’s somewhat trivial.
as a note, we do minify, and soon we’ll be using an even better minified version, we’re working the kinks out of it right now!"
That’s pretty bizarre. Most CDN’s will take care of browser detection and gzipping appropriately for mime types automatically. Looks like it’s not something Cloudfront currently supports (their CDN) so they have to do the extra work 
At least it’s on their radar.
My latest test results after making some changes to the thumb.php: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100617_48Y/
My old test results: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100613_3DT/
Any good suggestion for a CDN and would that help make things faster for my static content?
Patrick,
Thanks for your help on the images…I finally got the thumb.php right and am now finally an “A”…my text compression went to an “A” too as soon as I upgraded to Wordpress 3.0 so I am already loving the new Wordpress changes.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100619_7K1/
Now it’s time to move on and improve some more :).
Very nice. From the looks of the waterfall you need to find a way to enable page caching because that 4 second response time for the base page is going to kill you. I can’t tell from a quick search is it is something they added support for out-of-the-box or if you still need to use a plugin (which may be risky on a 3.0 install).