Webpage Test Results Inconsistency And Help

[paulg]

Hi Guys,

I am the webmaster for http://onlinediamondbuyingguide.com and had done some tests to analyze page loading speed with the tools here.

Here are my results:

• [url=http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_KY_1VF/]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_KY_1VF/[/url]
• [url=http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_DN_1TZ/]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_DN_1TZ/[/url]
• [url=http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_YK_1VX/]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120530_YK_1VX/[/url]

Is there a cause for concern for the varying timings that the page was downloaded?

Also, I can’t help but notice getting a F grade for “Cache static content”. The analysis shows quite a number of image files that should be cached. Is this something I can “turn on” or change from my server side or has this anything to do with the user’s computer settings?

Any advice is appreciated.

[pmeenan]

It looks like the middle test had slightly different content and loaded more requests before onload than the others 91 requests vs ~70. This could be because of differences in ads or timing on the page itself if there is javascript that rotates content or injects content (catching it before onload in one case). I wouldn’t worry about it too much but it’s probably worth understanding where it came from.

Yes, caching of static content is something you enable on the server but you should make sure it is suitable to do for your application before you do it. If you enable caching then user’s browsers will never ask for that file again so you can’t change the contents (usually more of a problem for css or javascript than for images). It looks like you are on an apache server so you could just drop a .htaccess file in your images directory that has something like this in it:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/gif A31536000
    ExpiresByType image/jpg A31536000
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg A31536000
    ExpiresByType image/png A31536000
    ExpiresByType image/bmp A31536000
</IfModule>

[duanemitchell]

Is there someway to force an update to the cached images? Like maybe remove that code when there’s an update to the website?

[pmeenan]

No, you need to change the actual file names for the browsers to re-request them. Hence:

but you should make sure it is suitable to do for your application before you do it. If you enable caching then user’s browsers will never ask for that file again so you can’t change the contents (usually more of a problem for css or javascript than for images).

You can mitigate it a bit by using a shorter cache expires time (a few hours) and just deal with the fact that they will be stale for that time.