Guidance on Speed Improvements

Well my site LookGadgets is getting “A” grade on WebPageTest result: WebPageTest - Running web page performance and optimization tests...

The average load is 1.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds without CDN, I heard that CDN can speed up my website, but unfortunately it’s not happening that way with CDN. I have KeyCDN service but when I integrate CDN and try to load my static files from CDN, the loading speed gets increased to 3.2 to 4 seconds.

Well, my question is how do I increase the speed of my website?
And what CDN service do you recommend? other than CloudFlare and KeyCDN.

Anyone?
Please help me decrease my website’s loading speed!!!

Hey Richard - usually CDNs do improve, but there are very specific scenarios where they don’t. Your best bet would be to do exactly what you’re doing - testing with and without and seeing what you’re happiest with.

The important thing is to test many times, from many regions, and average the results when you make your decisions - tiny fluctuations in network, test agents, other servers can spike your results so never just test once.

And try multiple CDN’s too - usually they have a money back guarantee so no harm to your pocket other than your time setting it up and swapping urls. Amazon Cloudfront is another well-respected one to consider, and charges only on usage.

  1. Well, my question is how do I increase the speed of my website?

It appears your site is running on some sort of shared or VPS or VM type system.

If you require faster speed, them move to dedicated hosting.

You’re running WordPress, so look into someone who works with WordPress daily.

For my WordPress client sites, I test both single transaction speed + load speed (time required to handle 1,000,000 page views).

Your site’s already running faster than most, so you’ll likely require paying far more for hosting.

Although you are using SingleHop (shudder), so you might end up paying must less for faster hosting.

  1. And what CDN service do you recommend? other than CloudFlare and KeyCDN.

Don’t use a CDN, as this will rarely fix any site speed issue + add many layers of additional complexity you’ll end up wrestling with on a daily basis.

The first step I take with all new WordPress clients is strip out all cruft code - NGINX + Varnish + Squid + HAProxy - so there’s no cruft code between Apache + visitors.

Straight up Apache + PHP can easily deliver 1,000,000+ requests/minute (with no cruft code) when running in a well tuned runtime environment.

This is because when you optimize a site properly, any third party resources will slow it down (like a cdn in your case).

The only reason you should want to use a cdn now is for extra features they may offer, like security from cloud flare & to have a cdn take some of the load off of your server cpu/memory/bandwith by serving up static content.

If you don’t need any of those options, then you don’t need a cdn.

As @avalanch said, any well tuned site will only slow down using external services.

And, you’ve already answered your question.

If your site slows down using KeyCDN… then don’t use it.

In fact, avoid any 3rd party service that slows down your site.