My site is smartnutrition.ca and my results are here:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141001_5S_7C7/1/details/
I’d appreciate any help analyzing what’s going on here. Obviously my first byte time is really slow. Unfortunately, I’m a noobie at this and besides that one observation, I really don’t know anything yet about about how to analyze this
Huge thanks in advance for any help
1 - Move the redirect from smartnutrition.ca to www.smartnutrition.ca into your .htaccess file. It will be a lot faster than it is right now (which is being done by wordpress).
2 - You have a lot of external css and js loading in the head of your page (the first 25 requests). A plugin like W3 Total Cache can help merge them together (or you can do it by hand by editing the theme).
3 - You have some MASSIVE png images that should be jpegs (5MB+): http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimages.php?test=141001_5S_7C7&run=1&cached=0
Recompress and re-publish the images and the page will be a lot faster overall.
4 - The images are WAY bigger than they appear in the actual page. You should resize them so that they are actually the size that they are displayed.
5 - It looks like there are a boatload of ads and tracking pixels (upwards of 100 requests from the looks of it). Maybe they’re all important to the page, just worth being aware of.
Thank you so much for the help.
Ok, for a noob, I’m very happy to say I got #1 accomplished and redirected from inside .htaccess. I did it from within #BEGIN Wordpress, just so you know, in case that’s not correct.
#2. I also just installed WP Super Cache. I used to have W3 Total Cache, but I was having site problems with some changes it made it .htaccess and my host recommended not using it.
#3 I can do with some time.
#4 Just to clarify, you’re saying this about the home page right? I believe the reason for this is that WordPress or my theme is taking the full size picture from the actual blog post, and resizing it as a thumbnail for the blog roll. I’m not entirely sure how to change this. We update the blog regularly and I do want the home page automatically populated with the featured image of each post.
#5 This is the most concerning part to me, I’m concerned there may be some malware on my site. A while back I found a strange link in the footer, and so I restored the site from an older backup and changed my passwords, and it went away, so I thought it was resolved. I have three ads in total on the site. I can’t figure out why this would require over 100 requests. Any suggestions how to track this down? I turned off all of my ads, deleted the cache, and re-ran the test. Here are the results:
Something is definitely up. Lijit (Sovrn) and Google Ads are the only ads I’ve ever installed. I still see them there, so I don’t know what the deal is.
#4 - yes. It would be great if your theme automatically resized the images because they are really killing the home page.
#5 - you can test by blocking ap.lijit.com and pagead2.googlesyndication.com and all of the extra requests go away: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141002_0R_RZA/
I’d recommend blocking one at a time but my money is on most of them being tied to Lijit.