What is easy to do to improve speed from test result?

[pmeenan]

Are you sure W3TC is installed and working? 26 seconds for the base page to respond is just about the worst I have EVER seen (and I have seen a lot). Even without a caching plugin and an obscenely slow hosting provider I have never seen it that bad. W3TC should be caching a static version of your page and should return in well under 1 second.


The compression is referring to gzip compression. That is usually done by modifying the .htaccess file in the root of your site by adding something like:

Code:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain    
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml    
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
</IfModule>

(this is for apache 2.x, 1.x uses mod_gzip). It does require that your hosting provider have gzip compression enabled for their apache - if not yell at them because they should.

I know some stuff about W3TC but have never had to configure it so hopefully someone else chimes in (I know several here have) but you need to give it a list of css and javascript files to merge together which will handle the "combine css/js" recommendation.


You should take care of the problems in this order, and then come back and see what things look like:

1 - Fix the base page response time. Nothing else matters until you get that 26+ seconds reduced.

2 - Enable gzip compression. It's just a configuration setting and has no risk.

3 - Configure W3TC to merge the css and javascript files