Very slow load speed

I’m new to web design, and very inexperienced with site optimization. I’m definitely a designer rather than a developer, but I want to be able to solve my own problems. I’m putting together a Wordpress site with Divi which is very image heavy, and the child theme css is pretty large. I’m experimenting with a number of plugins trying to speed things up, but I can’t get a lot of the files to compress, most significantly the child theme css file. I was playing around with the .htaccess file, but anytime I tried to put anything in there it broke the site. The temporary url is http://gunga.users.sonic.net/. Any advice? Pleeez?

Seeing your metrics, I think you have the site faily optimized, what do you miss, it’s the use of a CDN, because your server looks a bit slow, a free CDN like Cloudflare, should do the trick, but looking at your URL, seems to me that do don’t have access to the DNS configuration, am I right?

I’d consider changing the server in that case, you can get a new server for as low as 5$ per month.

In my oppinion, your problem relies on the high latency of your hosting, but that’s of course, just an oppinion.

Thanks, Markohs. I’ve been using this url to build the site-- my final url will be marthawadedesign.com. I think this changes things? Not sure, I will look into it. Do you have any advice about how to compress specific files that don’t seem to be affected by the plugins I’m using? I appreciate your time and help!

Hi. No need to compress images any further, you already have A grade on that subject:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151028_J9_PGP/

You only have bad score on compressed html, and that depends entirely on the server configuration. If you are going to get a new DNS domain, you can use cloudflare, it’s very easy, and will solve your performance issues. I don’t know if linking that company here it’s allowed by the forum rules, you can google yourself, but the process it’s very easy, once you have the domain set-up the typical way, you just need to change your domain nameservers to cloudflare ones, they have a good setup workflow, easy to follow. If you need further assistance, just let me know.

You can also use “wordpress w3 super cache plugin” and setup it to serve STATIC cached versions of your pages too (since your content is mostly static from what I see), that’s going to optimize performance even further.

Thanks for your help!

Hi your compression is still getting low scores. Add this to your htaccess and it will resolve the issue.

# BEGIN Compress text files <ifModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/xml text/css text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml application/xhtml+xml application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript application/json AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf application/x-font-otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/truetype font/opentype

Other than fixing compression issues, your site looks good to go!

Compression will help your scores a lot, but you have a very slow server response speed.

My Firefox plugin tells me that http://www.marthawadedesign.com/ is running Apache 1.3 and PHP 4.4 on an Unix server.

On the assumption that this is correct, then your infrastructure is maybe a decade out of date, and a security nightmare, unsupported in every way. In addition that age of hardware may well be a core part of your performance problem.

I recommend that you migrate to an up to date VPS ( don’t use a shared service, as a decent performance is a fundamental to your business ), and start tuning that. Then see what difference that makes.

Others have commented on the lack of compression, which is true. However, most of the resources are being delivered from gunga.users.sonic.net, a server that I expect that you’ve no control over.

PS. Don’t use cloudflare. They take over your soul.