Our website tested pretty poorly.
We have our js ads load after the page… but the load time is still running on them until they complete. Any way of speeding things up with them? Anything else we can do?
Thanks in advance!
There is tons of stuff you can do:
You have 185 (!) Requests on your page. This is HUGE. Try to concatenate CSS and JS files, were possible. Look into the possibility of spriting images.
Especially with JS this is crucial, as it very often has a blocking character, one way or the other. You are downloading 71 (!) JS Files in total.
Your 185 Requests are against 71 (!!!) domains, and most often the only thing that happens, is a Redirect (302, the yellow lines). So you pay the price of a DNS-lookup and a full three way TCP-Handshake (serially), for a couple of bytes. You have 35 (!) Redirects on your page.
Try to get the amount of domains and redirects you are using much much lower.
After that you should look into Caching, as even with a primed Cache you still have more than 70+ Requests. Maybe you want it that way, as this is all Ads, Tracking & Targeting Requests. But IMHO you then should think about, if you haven’t gone too far on that end.
Kind regards,
Markus
Thanks Markus-
The tracking and ads are contracted pieces that must remain.
I’m currently running WP - Super Cache, would WP-Minify be something that would help “concatenate CSS and JS files”?
W3 Total Cache would help (and can replace WP Super Cache). It does both caching and concatenating/minifying (some manual configuration required for concatenating)
-Pat
Thanks Pat… is W3 difficult to setup? Or is it as simple as deactivating Super-Cache and installing W3?
Would Super and WP-Minify get me close to what W3 does?
It’s not terribly difficult, you just have to go through a wizard for the minify settings.
Our page test is pretty slow http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110802_4M_17AQW/ as well and i am using w3tc i was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to decrease the load time. thanks in advance.
A couple of quick notes (in order of importance):
1 - start with your http page (unless it’s common for your users to be using the https version of your page). The ssl negotiation for https is VERY time consuming (4 network round trips). Here is the same page tested over http: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110802_0X_e75840c62d35467d98cddedbd971ceb1/
2 - Fix all of the 404’s. May not help with performance but something on your page is broken (looks like some fancy shadows and whatever tipsy.css is used for)
3 - Go to the minify settings and go through the help wizard to combine your css and javascript files. It looks like you have over 8 css files and over 20 javascript files). Get them down to a manageable number (1-2 of each).
4 - convert those large 24-bit png images to be 8-bit png’s: http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimages.php?test=110802_0X_e75840c62d35467d98cddedbd971ceb1&run=1&cached=0 They should look almost identical but they will be significantly smaller.
5 - Take a look at spriting the smaller page graphic images (icons, etc)
I’d bet you can easily get the page under 5 seconds without too much work and probably even better than that.
for w3tc to fully work should i enable mod_expires and mod_headers? and the main reason for the https on the whole site is because of my login boxes located at the bottom of every page i would like my clients to feel secure when using them. thanks for your help
I think W3TC can operate without the modules but it’s probably a good idea to have them enabled anyway (I think it works in a better mode that way - modifying .htaccess instead of routing all requests through the php code).
Patrick-
Reading up on W3TC and it says that I should NOT minify the js ads? Is that accurate?
Most of the ads js should come from a 3rd party domain and not something you serve. You should only combine and minify the files being served directly for your page.
“3 - Go to the minify settings and go through the help wizard to combine your css and javascript files. It looks like you have over 8 css files and over 20 javascript files). Get them down to a manageable number (1-2 of each).”
Trying to do this in preview mode and when i save the setting and view preview all i get is a blank page any ideas?
So I’ve installed W3TC. Here are my new results:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110803_1Q_17PRH/
Getting a lot where the repeat visit is higher - then sometimes the repeat is like 2.5 seconds.
I have the following things enabled in W3TC (marked with *)
HTML / XML
Enable*
Inline CSS minification*
Inline JS minification*
Don’t minify feeds
Line break removal*
JAVAScript
Enable*
Combine only after
Combine only after
Combine only before
Preserved comment removal (not applied when combine only is active)
Line break removal (not safe, not applied when combine only is active)
CSS
Enable*
Combine only
Preserved comment removal (not applied when combine only is active)
Line break removal (not applied when combine only is active)
Anything else I should enable here? I also enabled, page, database, object, and browser cache with etags and set headers.[hr]
Another example:
You should also take a look at the browser cache support. Looks like the static images could use some browser-side caching.
The onload looks to be firing at different points in the waterfall for first and repeat views. You might have some async activity that is just getting caught in the repeat view. You should try doing a video capture and take a look at the filmstrip views for the first and repeat views to see how they look visually.
Most of the remaining requests look to be a (lot) of ad requests so those are largely going to be out of your control.
Thanks again. Do I have my ads set up efficiently? I set up divs where I wanted them and then used loaders at the bottom of my page to place them where they go.