Optimizing for better "Start Render"-time

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

I am trying to get the “Start Render”-time down to at least 2 seconds. But I am a little lost at the moment. What is the big hold up: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150116_1G_MX4/

Just a guess would be the Javascript which needs a lot of time to process?

The above test was with Chrome. The same with the Firefox browser shows acceptable Rendering times: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150116_96_MX7/

The big question. What is Chrome doing so different, that it starts so late with the rendering? And what can I do to change that?

2

I would start with lazy loading images(Google).

Then async load your fonts(Loading webfonts with high performance on responsive websites).

Outside of the html & css those are your largest(in the case of images…most numerous) request. Images & fonts are really hurting your time to first byte, which is where your page render begins.

3

We don’t have Chrome Canary on the Falkenstein agent but recent Chrome builds are much better about rendering sooner so it will probably be in-line with Firefox in the 41 release (maybe 40, I can’t remember which build some of my changes made it into): http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150120_8C_Z9S/

That said, there are a few issues you should really tackle:

1 - Fix the broken keep-alives. If your hosting provider refuses to, change hosting providers. Having to open a new connection for every request is excruciating!

2 - Serve the resources from the same domain (www.auf-kreuzfahrt.de instead of aufkreuzfahrt.com). Using a different domain requires a DNS lookup before any of them can be fetched and by default browsers will start with 2 connections to your original domain so it will get a good head start. The exception is if you are using a CDN but that doesn’t look to be the case.

3 - Looks like you are using 5 different custom fonts. Do you really need all of them? Make sure any that you do use are subsetted to the character set that you need which will make the downloads a lot smaller.