I’m working on improving a wordpress site, but I get a terrible response from twitter over https: as you can see at
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131028_ZJ_11A/
Server is in Amazon Dublin’s DC. Any suggestions as to how to address this?
Cheers,
Steve
Personally, I’d address this by removing the social media elements. For most businesses, it just doesn’t make sense to be pushing social media at all. It’s the ‘hip’ thing to do, but unless there’s a reasonable expection that you’ll be developing a significant following, it’s just slowing down your website (about 25% of HTTP requests are for these widgets) and providing more exit points for your visitors.
If you do want the social presence, wouldn’t the buttons on the right hand side suffice? The widgets on the left are troublemakers.
Going into your question, however, I’m not sure why that test machine is getting stuck on Twitter. It doesn’t happen for me personally, nor from another test machine (although that one does seem to get stuck on “DOM Content Loaded”, as does this one). Your test results show a -2 error code for the Twitter resource, and fairly long wait times for SSL negotiation; see this thread for a similar issue.
Are you aware that the English version returns a database error?
If you really want to keep them, try inserting them using with an onload event hander - Aaron Peters has an example - Why Loading Third Party Scripts Async is not Good Enough - Aaron Peters (might be a bit out of date now)