Test tools variance speed results

[kpmcgee73]

(11-25-2015 08:57 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  Hosting looks fine. What you have is mostly front-end (design/app) issues.

A few things jump out:

- Merge the css and js files into fewer bundles instead of individual resources. Even with SPDY/HTTP2 it helps and for the non-SPDY cases it is critical. The first ~40 requests should be able to be reduced to 3-4.

- Use custom fonts sparingly. Looks like there are at least 4 on that page and they will delay text rendering pretty significantly.

- Decide if you REALLY need the AddThis widget and code. I don't know if it's better now but it used to do a lot of bad things to pages (and used to be a blocking script). If you do, make sure it is loaded asynchronously.

- Looks like the photo gallery widget loads all of the images simultaneously (this is where the bulk of the page weight comes from). It would be a LOT faster with a smarter gallery that only loads the initial photo during the initial page load and loads the other images after the main content has loaded (pulling it off well requires some work though). It also loads the high-resolution zoomed versions during the initial page load.

Realistically, you could get the load times down to about 1/3 of what they are now, particularly with the change to images and the css/js merging.

Hey,

Many thanks for your helpful response.

Ah, that's very interesting issue about the gallery images. I purchased two plugins from Woocommerce, you'd think they would consider such issues!

I'll ask the theme developer about those fonts I think they only use x2 so could be another plugin creating additional font requests??

I've been told by Addthis that it loads asynchronously, I removed it, but it didn't seem to make a difference :-)

The WP Rocket plugin is mean't to merge css and js into smaller packets, so I think that is covered, but to be honest I'm not sure if it is doing it correctly. Was that just a general observation or specific insight?