Hi can someone please tell me what I need to do to get my site to run better. I ran the test and to be honest don’t understand any of it!!! This is all new to me. Can someone please help me. My website is http://www.lusomontreal.com.
Thanking you in advance for any help you can provide a total newbie!!
First step is to run a test of the site: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100309_5T3S/
Looks like there is a lot of room for improvement. Here is the order I’d recommend working on it:
1 - Enable gzip compression for html, css and js mime types. That will save 560KB off of the download and should just be a tweak to the server configuration (or .htaccess since it looks like you are running on apache). It will speed up the site and also save you a bunch of bandwidth (and it’s a trivial server configuration change).
2 - Combine those css files into a single file and same for the javascript files. You should be able to get your start render time down from 13-14 seconds to 3-4 seconds with just that change and it will have a huge benefit to how fast the site “feels” to your users.
3 - Set a far future expiration on all of the images, css and js. That will eliminate all of the “yellow” requests in the repeat view and make the site REALLY fast for anyone coming back a second time. It does mean that you can’t edit or change the files without changing the file name though.
4 - Create an image sprite for the graphical elements on the page (see SpriteMe for help making it easy).
5 - Go through your images and make sure they are the right format and are compressed as much as possible without losing quality (we recommend using the “save for web quality 50” if you are using Photoshop for jpeg’s). I see some images that should be jpeg’s instead of png’s (like this one: http://www.lusomontreal.com/images/stories/MyYoodrawer/criancas/criancas.png) that would be a LOT smaller and the ones that are already jpeg’s could be 50-80% smaller as well without losing quality.
These are pretty much the critical things that you NEED to do. There is a lot more you could do to make it faster even after these but unless you make these fixes nothing else will really matter.
Hi pmeenan,
Thank you for all the suggestions! I will now hit google and see if I can figure out how to do all of the suggested. The one I see that I can start on right away are the images so is it better to always use jpg’s instead of png’s?
Again thank you for your help.
png’s work good for things like logos and artwork (particularly anything with text). If it is a photo or something similar to a photo then jpeg is the best way to go. You definitely have a lot of things that should bee png’s as well (all of the icons and things like that) but all of your photos should be converted to jpeg and saved with pretty aggressive compression.
I am looking for the same thing. Thanks for the suggestions pmeenan, it was really useful for me.
I am somewhat of a newbie too although I’ve had my site up and running for more than 3 yrs. I started the site without any html or CSS experience. I downloaded Wordpress and have used WP with various premium themes and lots of plugins to get the kind of look and features I wanted. Unfortunately, this method wasn’t always good for performance. To top it off, the Wordpress admin panel is so easy to use that a novice can get something up and running without ever knowing how to access the code.
For example, you that we create image sprites.
Here is where I am lost. I used SpriteMe. It combined several of my graphical images and provided me with a single file of the multiple images that were combined. I don’t know where to put the file.
The Wordpress theme I use is Genesis which isn’t really a theme. They call it a framework. It’s designed so that you don’t have access to all of the files you’d normally have access to.
Here is my site: www.laprogressive.com
Any advice?
@smkyle1, you’re probably best-off using something like W3 Total Cache which will let you do some of the optimizations without having to modify the template files. I don’t think it will help with spriting though.
Otherwise you should reach out to Studio Press and recommend they optimize the templates they use for Genesis.
also install Google page speed for firefox or Chrome. It helps to identify which images/scripts need optimising and serves an alternative.
