Support » Fixing WordPress » Site speed terrible. 19s load time!

  • I have been having issues with my site speed. I thought it was the images, so I worked for the past week to resize them. After all of that work, my site is slower!
    Pingdom.com recommends:
    Combine external JavaScript
    Parallelize downloads across hostnames
    Combine external CSS
    Leverage browser caching

    I don’t even know what those things are, let alone how to accomplish them. I’m a complete novice. I installed these widgets to try and help my site speed but saw no improvement:
    Autoptimize
    WP Super Cache

    My site: http://www.loveandduckfat.com

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)
  • I think it may be that your hosting is generally slow, I can’t pick out one specific thing. You could install the P3 Profiler plugin to see what that throws up.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    I’m using Hostgator, which I heard has good speed?

    If you’re on a shared hosting plan anywhere, the speed of your site could be adversely affected by your hosting neighbours.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Ok, well I’m running the P3 Profiler, which is way easier than individually turning off and on my widgets to see which one is slowing me down.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Turns out 72% of loadtime is due to plugins, with Jetpack taking up 63% of that. Wow!

    Yeah. I know people love it but Jetpack gets nowhere near my sites.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Thank you for that.
    Speed has improved slightly since deleting Jetpack, but I’d still like to figure out how to Parallelize downloads across hostnames. Pingdom.com gives me a “0” grade for that.

    You could try offloading your static content to a CDN? There are a few freebie/cheap ones knocking around now.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Just looked it up. Looks hard. 🙁

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Well I least I know where to start.

    Maybe Cloudinary?

    Hi Mutrux;
    I’m Autoptimize’s maintainer and got a mail as this post mentions that plugin. Had a quick look, doing a webpagetest.org test of your site.

    The main issues seem to be;

    1. there’s a huge amount of data being transferred; 1,598 KB = 1.5 megabyte
    2. large amount of images; approx 805.2KB (50.9% of total data transferred) is too much. Compressing images (jpeg compression ratio) could save up to 319.8 KB. Having less images (or smaller ones) clearly has a positive performance-impact as well, off course.
    3. no CSS/JS aggregation, minification or compression -> you don’t only have to install, but also configure Autoptimize (optimize HTML & CSS should be pretty fail-safe, JS will require some tinkering given the fact you’re doing a lot of jQuery, start with “force in head” and maybe “look only in head” as well, see FAQ for more info)

    hope this helps,
    frank

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Frank,

    Thank you for your help. I’ll configure Autoptimize and see if that helps. For the images, do I need to go in and resize them all individually? Or is there some faster/better way to do that?

    Obviously, I need to have photos on the site. Maybe hosting them somewhere else?

    You can install WP Smush.it, which can bulk-smush your images, but the gains won’t be as important as when you manually compress them. There apparently are other WordPress plugins that do better then smush-it, but I don’t have experience with those.

    Hosting images on another URL (even if not a real CDN) might make a difference indeed, as it allows a browser to initiate more downloads at the same time.

    Thread Starter mutrux

    (@mutrux)

    Frank,
    I installed Cloudinary as WPRanger suggested, which brought my image compression from a D to B! That worked great.
    Except now my First Byte Time went from a C to and F. Can anyone tell me what affects First Byte Time? Is this a problem with my host?

    –I have yet to configure Autoptimize

    Check out the test

    Thanks for the help!

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)
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