Sam Perrow

Hi @sozialia, thanks for contacting me. Can you tell me a little bit more about your environment? Specifically:

1) Which version of WP are you using?
2) PHP version?
3) Which browser are you using?
4) Are you noticing anything in your browser’s console? (In developer tools)

Web hosts can provide services around the world, so there’s no reason to focus on Australia. CDN’s can help provide better region specific performance. One host I recommend is Siteground.

Which version of PHP are you using? I would upgrade to at least 7.4 if you’re not already on that. If you are already on 7.4+, I would check with your web host to see if something can be done to improve your performance. I would also suggest removing some plugins if you can.

According to the results from Webpagetest.org below, it took about 2.5 seconds for the browser to download the HTML from your site. That’s the real problem you’re facing.

Hope this helps!

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/201007_DiS1_79149218d5090d9794b008ceb3ad1966/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1

@tdechangy
I really can’t tell you what the proper specs are for an ecommerce site. I suggest getting a webhost that allows for scalability easily. If you’re just starting out, you can get a cheaper plan, and upgrade as you get more traffic.

It would be a lot of text in the (?) symbol, so I just gave it its own block. Still thinking about the ideal way to display this…

WP automatically creates three DNS prefetch hints, which many people find annoying because those URL’s in the hints are not used by many sites, and those can be replaced with this plugin.

Hints can be delivered to the browser in these two manners, the effectiveness of either is about the same. It’s a bit complicated to explain how each of these works here.

I only mistakenly had some text referring to the “auto prerender” feature in place, but the actual feature isn’t ready yet. Stay tuned..

1) Yes I do believe ecommerce sites should invest in higher performance servers. Time is money right?

2) The “pro” version of the plugin I’m working on will allow for hints to be created which are specific for certain posts/pages. (Each post will have its own unique auto preconnect hints created). It doesn’t make since to use many prerender, or preload hints because those resources would go unused on many posts.

3) I have considered this idea, and it has many good points. However, it would not work for mobile users (50% of users), and the most common scenario this would be used is when a user is moving their cursor over a menu, dropdown or otherwise. In that case many link are obviously close together, and frequently you must move your cursor over/across some nav links you have no intention of navigating to. If you designed a script to fire when a cursor is moving towards a nav link, I would think it would fire too often. A better solution, in my opinion, is to do a preload/prerender on the “mousedown” event. That would work for mobile users, and would be more precisely targeted to loading links which will be used. The drawback of this is that it would only save the amount of time which passes until you lift your finger off the mouse (or phone screen), which must be at most 0.1 seconds. Doesn’t seem like much of an advantage.
I will take a look at those articles and see what they say.

@nootkan Thanks for contacting me.
The “auto preconnect” feature will automatically determine what the appropriate preconnect hints are that should be implemented. It does this by determining what resources are loaded from external domains, and captures those domain names which are turned into preconnect hints.
Preconnect and DNS prefetch resource hints only need the domain name, and not the full URL path to work properly. Prefetch, prerender, and preload use full URL’s. I recommend reading over the “Resource hint information” tab for some background information on how each resource hint works.
Hope that answers your question, and I hope you find the plugin useful!

@tdechangy Thanks for contacting me. That portion of about the Auto Prerender is not supposed to be in the plugin- it is part of an improvement I am working on and I had accidentally included it too early. I will make an update shortly which removes that.

The version I am working on will have an auto prerender feature that connects with Google Analytics, and it will be pretty awesome!

@prokreeger No problem. Let me know if you notice anything else.