Site resolving really slow

astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

Hi, I’ve so far applied the following solutions for cache to my website, but for some reason the site just remains slow to resolve and then gradually moves faster as it loads.

1. I configured and activated W3 Total Cache

2. I use Dreamhost, so I updated from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 Fast CGI

3. Tried using Cloudflare on Dhost, but as soon as I hit minify CSS, the website’s layout messed up, so I deactivated it, but the issue persists.

4. I deleted all plugins that were not in use.

As it stands I’m getting a 4 second delay to get the page starting to load. Once it start though, the loading is quite fast, but after 4 seconds waiting it kinda defeats the purpose.

What could be causing this?

My site is http://www.bollopreniao.com

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 18 total)

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Moderator t-p
(@t-p)

11 years, 3 months ago

Could be, for example:
– a poor or memory intensive theme
– poor or memory intensive plugins
– your hosts’ server is slow

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

Would the fact that I’m using a child theme have anything to do with it?

The theme I’m using is Repro and it’s a bit old, but this issue had not occurred before. It started a few months back and now it’s critical.

Admittedly I’ve only started with the testing a few hours ago and in the process I’ve deleted cache batches around 100 times. Maybe I should just let it set in and test the speed in a couple of hours?

Moderator t-p
(@t-p)

11 years, 3 months ago

contact the theme vendor, they may have update.

shadez
(@shadez)

11 years, 3 months ago

i got the same issue on DH…

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

@t-p I’m already using the latest version of the theme.

Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)

WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

11 years, 3 months ago

We can’t help with commercial themes.
Try T-p’s advice and contact your theme’s vendors.

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

But the issue isn’t my theme as far as we know. We’re just assuming at this point.

I just used W3 Total Cache to put my Javascript loading before the </body> as opposed to loading it at the <head> which I thought would be causing most of the blocking. So far thought my start render time is at 3 seconds which is pretty crappy.

Is there any way to better my start render time? This is the main issue.

Mika Epstein
(@ipstenu-dh)

DreamHost Rep

11 years, 3 months ago

astromono, your site is loading really fast for me. In fact, I checked at http://bytecheck.com/ and I get 0.224 seconds for a time to first byte. And that’s pretty darn fast.

Google PageSpeed online suggests you compress your images more but that wouldn’t impact your first byte, just total load time. When I read into the suggestions, I see that you’re loading images from multiple subdomains. Are you using Multisite or are you just pulling in posts from multiple separate sites? That could be the cause of slowness, since cross-subdomain requests can bog things down.

One thing I noticed is that your page source shows a big hunk of non-minified CSS which is weird.

menj
(@menj)

11 years, 3 months ago

I loaded the site and yes, it is quite slow. It could be because your site’s theme is too graphic-intensive.

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

@mika Hi, and thank you so much for replying! This is driving me nuts.

The site seems to load fast, but it’s the render time that’s slow. I used http://www.webpagetest.org/ and saw the start render time is about 3 seconds.

For some reason, when I opened the site in Safari and Firefox I got a faster start render time, but Chrome still makes the page sit for a while before it starts showing up elements. Like it’s trying to resolve something before even starting the loading.

I’m using W3 Total Cache’s CDN option with Amazon Cloudfront using wildcard DNS I requested from Dhost. So four subdomains to be accurate.

As for the non-minified CSS, I just couldn’t get it to work. Minifying my main CSS style breaks the layout somehow :S

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

I thought about adding gzip compression through SSH, but I don’t think I can do that on a shared server with Dhost. Also, it could be that it’s already enabled, but I’m not sure.

Moderator t-p
(@t-p)

11 years, 3 months ago

it could be that it’s already enabled, but I’m not sure.

you can test it (free online test): http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

Mika Epstein
(@ipstenu-dh)

DreamHost Rep

11 years, 3 months ago

gzip should be enabled by default.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Htaccess_tricks#Faster_Page_Load_Times_.2F_Bandwidth_Saver

Thread Starter astromono
(@astromono)

11 years, 3 months ago

@t-p Thank you for the link, I checked the site and the test showed that GZIP is active.

@mika I checked on that exact page for instructions, but I couldn’t get it to work when I tried the commands in SSH. I’m a n00b in that department.

Any idea why the issue with render times persist on Chrome, but not the other browsers? Did any of you experience a similar delay with the render times?

Mika Epstein
(@ipstenu-dh)

DreamHost Rep

11 years, 3 months ago

Well that’s plain odd… it’s not slow in Chrome for me at all. (Actually faster than Firefox and Safari).

Do you know where WebPage test was rendering from? I tested at Dulles, and first byte is 0.299s, but total load time is 10 seconds. All the slow load time is on your large PNG files (also http://s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/watch_as3-vflzajyYs.swf which … I don’t know if you can do anything about that).

I think you’d get a lot of speed out of compressing your images.