Huge problem with 2 websites

Web Site Optimization Help Needed
1

New comer, so try and be gentle :wink:

I have 2 websites (not on the same server) that have huge load times. I am the provider of the servers and I need to find out if my services are in cause or if this is a website issue and how to fix the problem.

First site is orthodontisteenligne.com: This site has some strange issues (htaccess will re-write itself) and the site is usually very slow 12 seconds or more [url]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141124_RV_6J7/[/url]

Second site is: topsherbrooke.com: This site hasnā€™t been around very long, but it takes forever to load and I canā€™t seem to find a good reason for such bad times. [url]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141124_VZ_6MH/[/url]

Please note that both sites are on separate servers but both servers have very few websites hosted on them (less then 5).

Thanks in advance

2

A few suggestions after skimming through the waterfall charts. Both sites issue two redirects before getting to the actual initial page. In the charts those two redirects are eating 2-3 seconds.

Then those initial page requests are fairly slow - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141124_RV_6J7/1/details/ - shows more than 4 seconds.

Both sites have lots of resources being loaded, making all of those requests takes time. Then the total size of the page, takes time to download all that data.

First two things Iā€™d do:

  • Fix the redirects, at most there should be one, ideally none
  • Examine what is happening in detail for the initial page request, that needs to be as fast as possible

WebPageTest by itself provides a great deal of data, but not much for specific suggestions. After you fix the redirection situation you can run the site through PageSpeed Insights - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - which will give recommendations on how to improve the performance of your site.

3

Looks like youā€™ve got corrupt css on both sites to meā€¦ the urls that are taking ages look suspiciously like css webfont definitions.

Clean the 404s up and try again is my advice.

4

Iā€™ll second Josephā€™s recommendation to get page Speed Insights. In addition to running it online like Joseph reccomends, you can also get a plug-in for Chrome from here.

Once you have the plugin installed, hit F12 to bring up the developer tools. You will see a tab called ā€œPageSpeedā€ in the lower console, so click on it. Then there will be a button that says something like ā€œAnalyze Pageā€, and click it.

I did run the tool against the second site that you mentioned. One of the top recommendations was to losslessly compress the images on the sight. PageSpeed is saying this will save about 425 KB on the sight, about 1/3 of the total bytes the site is requiring. The cool thing about the Chome plugin is that it will actually do the compression right in the plugin so you can just download the optimized image to your hard drive and then go upload it to your site. There are websites that do all this too, but the nice thing is its all built in for you right there.

It looks like you are also using the unminified versions of some of your libraries. For example, you are loading jQuery UI from the jQuery CDN, but the unminified version. Change http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.11.2/jquery-ui.js to http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.11.2/jquery-ui.min.js and you will load the minified version, again saving some bytes.

Finally, it looks like you are loading three different versions of the jQuery library (lines 24, 1658 and 2718) in your file. You should be doing just one, not just to save download bandwidth, but the browser has to parse each one of these files.

I would start there and then see where I was at.