I’m not a techie by any means but have been trying to speed up my sites with what I’ve been learning here and other places. (BTW webpagetest.org is seriously addictive!).
Consistently, the major downgrades I receive are for files that are adsense related. My understanding is that there isn’t much that can be done about this. Is it safe to say that a site running adsense has little chance of scoring A in Yslow or > 90 in Page Speed? Or is there more that I should be doing? Here are recent results from one of my site’s tests:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110304_H5_3BD3/
Any guidance or critique would be most appreciated. I’m using W3TC Wordpress plugin, MaxCDN and have just moved from a shared-host account to a VPS.
Thanks
The main issue if that you have some serious javascript parallel blocking going on there. Some browsers will not load other items in parallel if it is downloading a .js file… So you should ideally move all .js files to the bottom of your website code. As for adsense and other items, not sure if its against googles terms, but you can always try to defer loading of the script until body.onload, or something similar (assuming it doesn’t use document.write, which i’d hope not).
W3TC has options that let you combine and move where the javascript is loaded so it’s probably worth the time to look into the more advanced capabilities (I think you configure resource bundles or something like that).
On the adsense front, I don’t think it’s worth the effort to try to hack it to make it faster. I know several people have tried but I’m pretty sure there were issues with all of the implementations. At velocity last year they said they were working on an async version of adsense to go with the async version of analytics - I know it’s been a while but hopefully they succeed and It’s probably best to wait for an official solution.