Good site score, slow start render that includes a 2.5s gap?

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi Chaps,

I wander if you can help?

I’ve been tweaking my site to enhance the site score and it is now 96%.

However, the start render is 7.5 seconds which I want to improve. And it appears to include a ‘blank’ for 2.5 seconds just after the first second where nothing really happens. Any ideas?

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111214_D4_2GZC5/1/details/

Lastly, the full load time appears to be slowed down by Google Plus code - how much of an issue do you think this is?

Many Thanks

Joe

2

I think your answer lies in the graphs at the bottom of the waterfall - namely your CPU is pegged.

For a WordPress site you’re getting pretty decent performance, but something in your code (or, more likely your WP theme) is taking the browser a long time to process. Judging by the URL it looks like you’re probably using W3TC to merge the javascripts together. While this can reduce download time (fewer requests/round trips) it can confuse the browser which then has this huge .js file to process. This is especially true for IE7 which you selected as your test bed.

So what to do?

  1. try with a different browser option. IE7 is hardly a good baseline to test against now. Decide if IE7 is important to your user base.
  2. Try not merging the javascripts - even though this will result in more requests you might find that IE7 can process those javascripts in less time since it doesn’t have such a big .js file to look at.