After a bit of jerry-rigging, deactivating & reactivating, & doing a bit of my own optimizing (this wasn’t the host b/c my other sites were loading fine) I was able to get the site load faster. However, there are still a ton of .css & .js that appear excessive (in quantity). I’ve never experienced this before when I test other sites. Using the Autoptimizer plugin messed up the entire layout so I had to remove it.
So yes, I got the site to load a lot faster but what the Pingdom test is showing me is several “F” grades b/c of the quantity of css & js.
32 .js files = 47.8% of the load time requests
18 css files = 26.9% of the load time requests
The rest, images, html & “other” was around 20-22%
The site has a worldwide audience and within the US the load time is okay but the further away I get (testing speed) the slower it gets. We have several people in Australia who visit and the load time from there was over 8 seconds – even with the caching plugin which significantly lowered the time.
How can all the .js & .css files be reduced or consolidated so there aren’t so many requests? That seems to be what’s causing it. The initial page is less than 1mb and everything has been simplified & optimized as much as it can be (following every instruction I’ve been given) yet these number of js/css files loading are things I suspect will not count in our favor – especially if they are loading in the header before any content is reached (and I’m referring to indexing crawlers).