Thought I was doing well

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Ive been a user of this site for years, but just realized it has a forum.

I notice when I run a test on my site here I get a result thats over 3.5 seconds… but when I test on a few other sites I get under 1 second results.

here are my webpagetest results…

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120803_WK_2KX/1/details/

I am a page speed fanatic and am trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed from my site.

I know I need to learn how to combine my JS files (I try it but I mess up my sites responsive design when I do)… but what other things can you guys recommend for me to improve my score?

Thank you and thanks for the site!

Lonnie

2

Is your main user base in California? If not, using a CDN would be your easiest and biggest win and would probably shave close to a second off the times.

You should also change the html5shim code to load from your server instead of googlecode. Googlecode isn’t meant for serving ststic files and doesn’t include simple things like caching headers. They updated the docs recently to encourage self-hosting - GitHub - aFarkas/html5shiv: This script is the defacto way to enable use of HTML5 sectioning elements in legacy Internet Explorer.

Beyond that, it looks like all of the images for your slideshow are getting loaded at the same time, competing for bandwidth, even though only one of them is displayed initially. It’s more work but you’d benefit from lazy-loading the hidden ones and then triggering the rotation after they have all loaded.

3

Thank you for replying.

I purchased an edgecast cdn about a month ago but cant figure out how to upload my content to it… so it sits worthless.

The shim was part of the bootstrap template I bought… i will look into doing as you suggested.

Thanks for the feedback about the images loading at the same time… I dont know how to “lazy load” them… but its another thing I will look into.

Thank you!

4

A lot of CDN’s will work in a “pull” mode where they will automatically pull the resources from your server as they are requested.

It might be worth giving Cloudflare a try. You can get the benefit of the CDN without really having to make any changes to your site (and they can also provide some other optimizations).

5

Im getting a little bit better.

Got it down from 52 to 29 requests.

The funny thing is I thought my site was fine when i had 65 requests… I would have never thought I could have got it down to 29 without almost any visible changes to the sites look from a users standpoint.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120806_8H_RTA/1/details/

I deleted some images that nobody was probably looking at anyway on the bottom right.

I also:

  1. put the site on cloudflare
  2. deleted some little used JS files
  3. combines my css into one larger file
  4. put the shiv in a local file

that got my time down to 2.7 seconds.

Im thinking cloudflare has messed up my scrolling images at the top of my site… so ill be working on that next.

The site is http://bootcamp4me.com is anyone is interested.

thanks for all your help!

6

One really quick suggestion that should shave another 200ms, add an empty conditional IE comment up before the css include. For whatever reason, IE blocks when it reaches the first conditional comment which is what is causing the break after min.css (instead of downloading the javascript in parallel).

7

So if i am reading your recommendation correctly… I make it something like this before the stylesheet?

<link href="assets/css/min.css" rel="stylesheet">
<!-- HTML5 shim, for IE6-8 support of HTML5 elements -->
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://bootcamp4me.com/assets/dist/html5shiv.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]>
	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="assets/css/ie.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!-- fav and touch icons -->

If i do the test from Chrome at the same location it goes down to 2.41

so yeah, IE is slower

8

yup, that one change should improve IE performance across the board.

9

“Im thinking cloudflare has messed up my scrolling images at the top of my site… so ill be working on that next.
thanks for all your help!”

This sounds like a Rocket Loader bug. Do you have this turned on?

10

No, i wasn’t. I think the problem was either that I deleted a JS file that I wasn’t supposed to or that the “combine js” option in Cloudflare caused issues.

I have since moved on to MaxCDN

The best I have now is 2.2 seconds using a MaxCDN

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121023_AG_4P/1/details/

Still think I should be going much better with only 22 requests and a 256kb page.

11

If you look at the bandwidth line at the bottom of the chart, it is taking ~1 second before things get ramped up and you’re fully utilizing the pipe.

Of particular interest is the blocking behavior at 0.8s (after ie.css). It’s possible that it’s just an IE8 thing and newer browsers will be more parallel - though some browsers break at the head so they don’t starve the critical requests.

Realistically you’re probably only going to get faster if you inline the css and html5shiv code but the custom fonts may still be the long pole (btw, you should not be using html5shiv from googlecode, you should download it and re-host - googlecode is not good for serving static resources).

btw, at 1.5Mbps, the fastest you can transfer 256KB is in the 1.4-1.5 second range and that’s even after the connections are warmed up so you’re not really THAT far from optimal.