Understanding my results: slow load times

[pdibona]

I took a look at the results of 20 runs in WebPagetest and have come up with some findings:

The First byte times are relatively consistent, which means the hosting is most likely not the issue, at least not for the base page.

The Median TTFB was around 2.0 Seconds, not horrible, but could be better.

http://imgur.com/nF0BBOq

The Time to Start Render was highly variable, which had a median of 4.297 seconds.

http://imgur.com/4R1TCgZ

That's 2.3 seconds spent from when the base page started downloading, to when the first image shows up.

This large time is spent doing all kinds of DOM thrashing from javascript. Doing a quick https://developers.google.com/speed/page...ab=desktop shows that there are 16 blocking Javascripts, of which most are pre-render time.

Here is the list:

http://campvoyageur.com/…-includes/js/jq...ver=1.11.3
http://campvoyageur.com/…s/jquery/jquery...?ver=1.2.1
http://campvoyageur.com/…Slider/static/j...ver=1.11.8
http://campvoyageur.com/…slider.kreatura...?ver=5.4.0
http://campvoyageur.com/…/js/layerslider...?ver=5.4.0
http://campvoyageur.com/…query.themepunc...ver=4.6.93
http://campvoyageur.com/….themepunch.rev...ver=4.6.93
http://campvoyageur.com/…/jquery.validat...?ver=4.3.2
http://campvoyageur.com/…/js/jquery.vali...?ver=4.3.2
http://campvoyageur.com/…/js/simple-staf...s?ver=1.17
http://campvoyageur.com/…etina-2x/js/pic...?ver=3.0.1
http://campvoyageur.com/…cator/external-...?ver=6.4.9
http://s0.wp.com/…ontent/js/devicepx-jet...ver=201601
http://campvoyageur.com/…nt/themes/creat...js?ver=5.4
http://campvoyageur.com/…ntent/themes/cr...js?ver=5.4
http://campvoyageur.com/…assets/js/js_co...?ver=4.5.2

This big mess of blocking JavaScript is probably due to too many add-ons.

I believe an audit and some iterative testing like Anton suggested would be the best approach.

I see a lot of marketing and social media add-ons, which might seem like a good idea, but they tend to be very problematic for page performance.

Removing add-ons will not only improve your first byte times (most likely) it will also most likely improve the page render time as well as improve the overall user experience.

I'd take a look at what happens when you turn off the marketing add-ons alone, and see what happens to the Dom Complete (Load Time) times, then go from there.

Pete