My clients site receives an ‘A’ rating from most webpage speed test sites yet it loads extremely slow, over 15 secs.
Can anyone tell me what might be going on?
Thanks for the help!!
Just so we’re all looking at the same test: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140410_0C_f52c72028ef0bf2336636e865dad55f6/
It’s mostly from really bad server performance serving the base page (and the redirect) but there’s quite a bit that can be done to make it better.
1 - Quit using wordpress to redirect from www.viridisdesignstudio.com to viridisdesignstudio.com. Put the redirect into the .htaccess directly instead, that way it will happen a LOT faster.
2 - Fix the wordpress first byte performance problem. We can’t see what’s causing it from the outside but odds are it’s because of the hosting provider and plan they are on and it’s coming from slow database performance. You can use a caching plugin (W3 total cache or WP supercache) to hide the issue but it will still be there. You can try disabling all of the plugins to see if it’s a specific plugin but it’s likely coming from the database performance itself and getting better hosting is probably the best solution.
3 - That’s a LOT of separate css and js files being loaded. They need to be combined somewhat so it doesn’t take so many round trips to load them (a plugin like W3 total cache can help automate that for you as well).
Got a 4 second total pageload time on you here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140410_AB_TMW/
You’re not leveraging browser cache of static content, and the 87ms FBT goal used seems unattainable for this. The 394 ms you have for that is a decent outcome actually.
Patrick - I see different FBT goals for different sites all the time. How is this calculated?
The First Byte time goal is calculated based on the socket connect time so that it factors in the RTT to the server (physical distance). Basically it’s supposed to allow for 100ms of server time in addition to the round trip time for server processing to get an A (DNS is given a pass regardless of how long it takes).
87ms seems unattainable and arbitrary.
The issue ended up being the hosting. The site was on an old GoDaddy plan, once upgraded the site started loading much faster.
Thanks for the response.