I have a caching plugin that I have added script to that caches all my pages and then clears the cache at midnight and re-caches the site…it takes about an hour for it to run through and cache all my pages, but it has made a huge difference. All this was done through script, hyper cache, and a cron job.
I would really like to make improvements, but have no idea…every time I try to add something to my htaccess it seems to shut my site down? Any input would be appreciated :).
The Bad news first: You probably can’t reach an “A” across the board, as some of your assets are delivered by third parties, where you don’t have control over the HTTP Headers.
But apart from that, there is still stuff you could do.
First and foremost: You should concatenate your CSS and JS Files. That should give you quite some benefit in the Time-To Render area. Also put as much JS in the bottom as possible. And only the necessary JS stuff in the HEAD.
Second: You should work on the HTTP Response Headers that are under your control (I assume jupiterflhomes.com)
You should put there some Cache-Control: Public, Max-Age=(LongTimeinSecs)
Additionally you should get rid of ETAG Headers, and I would recommend to also remove Vary: User-Agent. This Header will render Proxy-Caching almost impossible.
Third: You are loading tons of images right at the start (the houses), even though only 1 is actually visible. So you do some kind of speculative pre-fetching, which slows down the initial page performance. You might check, if this strategy matches how your users interact in reality with your page.
Fourth: There are 2 images, that could by compressed with a big gain. One being your contact info png. This can be converted to a ~15 KB JPG without much of quality loss (currently it is ~100 KB). The other image is Front Property JPG.
Thanks for the reply and I will start implementing some of those changes and see how it goes…I had 500 images last week and have since reduced it to 73 and am now working on trying to convert them to web images via photoshop.
Probably a misconfigured plugin or somthing. My suggestion is to minify and concatinate them manually and use that file as your stylesheet instead of minifying on the fly.
As LeptienM already stated… you need to add cache-control headers to the images, stylesheets, javascripts, and other static assets. The Caching described by this tool does not refer to server side caching, rather caching that takes place in the users browser (or their ISPs proxy)
If you want to do speculative preloading of content i suggest to do those after window.onload so you wont be holding up the pageload while the non-essential assets load.
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond…to tell you the truth, this all sounds foreign to me, but I guess we all start somewhere :s. Are these things I need to learn or is it stuff that should be outsourced to someone alittl more knowledgeable?
well that depends how much you can invest. If you can invest some amount you should outsource it. In most cases you can only get advice for free but need some skill set to do all these. You don’t need to learn every thing and do it your self.