Test results here: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170111_EN_801F/1/details/
What would you say would would improve the performance of pageload time for this test result?
What metric are you looking to optimize? The RUM first paint has fired at 1.29s. So important things load up fast.
There is a huge 3rd party burden: http://requestmap.webperf.tools/render/170112_0G_87a56c785187d8ef3f02cdea12cf8e41
However, it would be a longer conversation since it could be driving revenue. So this is not a very straight forward issue of fixing the issue but a deeper conversation on what tags matter and what can be removed or deferred.
Thanks. Yes 3rd party scripts are big and agree separate conversation, although I think any 3rd parties can be deferred until after domContentLoaded.
I’m interested in reducing domInteractive and domContentLoaded. Is there anything specific there that would help? So the 1st party parts are as optimised as possible while the 3rd party scripts work is ongoing. Also, fonts is there a better way to load?
Hmm, you have to break it down piece by piece and do something about the parts that are taking to much time. As a start I would do what you already mentioned, reduce domInteractive.
Optimization 1
In your critical render path (requests 1-22, colored green in “Request Details” section for run 7), there are 5 3rd party domain names. Is it possible to move the code over to your primary independent.co.uk domain?
[list=1]
[]ak.sail-horizon.com
[]code.jquery.com
[]sc.independent.co.uk
[]stag.mdotlabs.com
[*]tags.bkrtx.com
[/list]
For example, you are connecting to code.jquery.com just for the latest Jquery script. You could copy it over to your static domain and reduce one extra domain lookup+connection.
Optimization 2
You are using preload resource hint for the fonts. This is good for FF and Chrome. If optimization#1 is not possible, you could add a preconnect hint for the 3rd party domains. This should reduce a little bit of time in loading of the resources. You would need to preconnect to the tags in critical path - so this would be following domains:
[list]
[]ak.sail-horizon.com
[]code.jquery.com
[]sc.independent.co.uk
[]stag.mdotlabs.com
[]tags.bkrtx.com
[]static.independent.co.uk
[/list]
General Optimizations
You could consider the following for long term changes:
[list=1]
[]Combine the JS and CSS to reduce round trips
[]Move site to HTTPs and then turn on HTTP/2
[*]Enable gzip compression across all resources - and ask 3rd parties to compress as well.
[/list]
Hope this helps.
I would say the second method is probably more advisable for this situation.