Google Webmaster Tools says that my website takes longer than 99% of sites to load. I do have a lot of scripts but I didn't think it would be considered slow. The URL is RT-Now[dot]com Feedback on how I can bring the page load time down? I'm running Wordpress. I think that I might have to remove some of the social media widgets from the right hand sidebar. Thanks R
On my 2 mbps internet connection your page loaded very slow ( infact for the first 15 sec it was complete white page, which is a big reason for bounce back visitors) how to improve:- use Gzip for css, js, and html (http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/) You will notice miracle in load speed almost 80% better
Here is two tools I use frequently that shows the loading speed and size for each element on your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/ http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ You can use their report to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff and optimize images.
Thanks for the tips thus far. I'm going to check out the "Improve My Load Time" plugin. Any other plugin suggestions? I'm using WP Super Cache as well.
Ok, I'm gonna run down the list of things I usually check for. First off, how big is it? 1.6 MEGABYTES in 77 files! That is almost 10 times the upper limit I would allow for a single page on a website!!! It is built from 38 separately included documents totaling 607k!!! Completely unacceptable. I wouldn't even TRY to save anything from that page and throw it all out to start over clean. In terms of handshaking overhead ALONE (before even talking about data throughput) it's anywhere from 20 seconds to two minutes overhead for the page to load completely. The HTML alone is 66k when you're only delivering 8k of plaintext and five content images? That's five or six times as much HTML as should be neccessary! Then it has an ungodly 733k of javascript -- FOR WHAT? A bunch of half-assed bloated social networking plugins? CSS it's looking at 209k? FOR THAT?!? There is no way in HELL that entire site needs more than 20k of CSS TOTAL. Though of course that it's chock to the gills with your typical turdpress bloat can't be helping matters either. Given what I'm seeing for appearance there's no reason for the HTML on that page to exceed 15k, the CSS to exceed 20k, and with the content images on it I very much doubt it needs to break 192k total. Total trash -- throw it out and start over, there's NOTHING worth even TRYING to save there... do yourself a favor, if something wants to add 100k of javascript to your page, the answer is no... if you want to add twenty separate things that add 50k of javascript apiece to the page, the answer is "OH HELLS NO!"
Appreciate the insight. Glad to see you took all that time to research my website. I'm looking into cutting out some javascript for starters.
So far I've removed one social media buttons plugin that I had in the right hand column. I also removed the Facebook "like" box & twitter feed. Instead I added 4 small icons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and RSS. I'm also cleaning up my WordPress plugins to make sure nothing in there is bogging it down unnecessarily. Does anyone have any suggestions of plugins to help aside from Super Cache
You have way too much stuff on the page for no reason. Split the page up into smaller pieces. Your header3.jpg is way too large - it spills off the page to the right. Same with your twitter feed box - it spills outside of the page frame.
Regarding spilling off the page - what browser are you using? I haven't seen the header or twitter not fit.
Deleted a bunch of plugins and that made a huge difference. Also dramatically cut down on the content for the home-page for even faster loading. I found that deleting the social media plugins and adding the buttons in myself improved performance greatly. Happy! Not dont yet though. What can I do to cut down on the CSS?
Your site's not slow - it takes less than a second for me to load it. If you see slowness it could be that your path to your host is slow. The only solution to that other than changing providers is to move. (Every site has a slow path for about 65% of the computers in the world.)
Thanks, I've noticed that its performing much better now that Ive cut down on plugins. Too many plugins = no bueno
I would recommend getting rid of any add-ons such as Flash or Java. Also optimize your CSS and lower the amount of images you use on your website. Lastly I recommend finding a fast hosting provider that can deliver your website in reasonable times.
I have a well performing & reputable host so that is less of a factor here. I have already cut down on Java drastically, as well as CSS from plugins. What are other ways to optimize CSS?
We were just discussing that on another forum (among plugin developers). Some people write a whole (and inefficient) plugin to do what a simple template edit will do.
This is true. Also people create plugins that may contain outdated or unnecessary code. Many of the social media plugins that I had installed were using the old-style embed code for each service.
i think your php thumb creation is not helping, are initial images too fat? Compress and minify javascript and move them to the bottom of the page.Leaving them in the header is slowing the rendering of the page. I looked at some other images like header4 , 54k. just by lowering the quality a bit , i got them to 25k. If the job is done all over the site, perfs will improve. I just quickly looked at your site, lots of things you can do to improve performance , before adding plugins all over
I saw your website RT-Now.com, it took 20 seconds to open the website, i have 512 Kbps speed internet connection therefore I can say that your website is running. Try to reduce the image size. If you have access to Cpanel of your hosting account then check how far your website is consuming the CPU Process. Many times hosting company slow down the website if it's taking much processor resource.