[Support request] Maximising Page Speed

[Alan]

Hi

Ive just switched themes to GeneratePress because the themes are extremely well built and fast. I want to make sure that I don’t ruin that whilst building a website. In the past I have been informed whilst checking my old site with Ahrefs or visiting the Google console that my site is too slow.

When I did a speed test on my old site at pingdom I got the following results

Page size 548.8kb
Requests 51
Load time 926ms

Content Size
images 213.3kb
Font 203.6kb
script 87.3kb
css 29.4kb
html 9.4kb
xhr 546b

What are the best practices when building a website. Ive read online that the following things make a difference. I’m not sure how much of a difference.

Removing Google fonts and choosing a standard font.
Removing Fontawesome icons.
Removing the “top of page” button that takes you back to the top of the page.
Keeping images small. Using something like tinyjpg.com to compress the images.

Apparently contact forms can also have an impact. Are some of them better than others when it comes to page speed? Ive read that Contact form 7 is pretty slow.

Thanks very much,

Alan

[Tom]

Hi Alan,

Removing Google fonts and choosing a standard font.
Removing Fontawesome icons.
Removing the “top of page” button that takes you back to the top of the page.
Keeping images small. Using something like tinyjpg.com to compress the images.

Those are all good places to start. You basically want to reduce the number of requests on your site. Things like Google Fonts, Font Awesome etc.. make large requests (locally or elsewhere) and will slow down your site.

If you use the System font, SVG icons (if needed) and reduce the number of images (or optimize them well), you should get good results.

I also like Autoptimize (a plugin) for reducing the number of requests on your site. You can learn more about it here: https://generatepress.com/fastest-wordpress-theme/

[Alan]

Thanks Tom.

I will have a look at that plugin. What were your thoughts on Contact forms. Is there one that you can recommend thats going to require less resources to run and wont affect the page speed as much.

Regards,

Alan

[David]

Contact Form 7 does use quite a lot of scripts that run across a site – for simple forms never noticed too much of an issue.

Personally all Form plugins for the basic needs are a bit urgh – but NinjaForms and HappyForms are quite popular for basic needs.

[Alan]

Does it make any difference to page speed and resources if the same form (CF7) is used on multiple pages compared to just having the one form on a contact page. I have got a contact form on almost every page.

Ive also got quite a bit of css to style the form. I presume that also adds to the loading time.

[Leo]

Does it make any difference to page speed and resources if the same form (CF7) is used on multiple pages compared to just having the one form on a contact page.

I would recommend simply testing this and run your site through a speed test for each scenario.

CSS shouldn’t be too bad.

[Alan]

Hi David

Thanks so much for mentioning “Happy Forms”. Wow they are so much better than Contact Form 7. So please you mentioned it. They look great and they are so easy to design 🙂

[David]

Glad to be of help.

[Alan]

I’ve run several speed tests on Pingdom over the course of the last week. They have been at different times of the day and the following results have been pretty consistent throughout the week. I havent yet installed the Autoptimize plugin that was suggested above by Tom but I intend to do that shortly. Before I do that I just want to check that it is also recommended to use a caching plugin as well as Autoptimize. My site currently has WP Super Cache installed.

My current Pingdom tests are still quite slow considering that I have no Google Fonts, No Font Awesome, No Top of Page button activated, and all of my images have been compressed by Tinyjpg.com

My results are as follows:

Performance Grade: B88
Page Size: 353.8KB (Down from 538KB)
Load Time: 2.31 Sec (Load time has varied but its been pretty consistently between 1.5 and 2.8 secs)
Requests: 43

Pingdom suggests the following improvements

Grade F 40 – Make Fewer HTTP requests
Grade C 78 Add Expires headers
All other grades are 100.

Content size by content

Image: 208.7KB
Script: 74.6KB
CSS: 54.7KB
HTML: 14.3KB
Font: 1.3KB

Requests by content

Image: 21
Script: 11
CSS: 9
HTML: 1
Font: 1

[David]

Autoptimize also caches the aggregated and minified files so a separate cache is not required.

The expires headers warning is your google analytics script – so you can ignore that as you cant change them for 3rd party served files.

The major one is reducing the number of requests – which is where autoptimize comes in by aggregating and minifying your Separate CSS and JS files.

[Alan]

Thanks David 🙂

Ive now added the Autoptimize Plugin and removed WP Super Cache and my results have improved significantly but the speed of the page is still averaging about 1.74 secs. Ive run some tests on other sites that rank well and its interesting that some of them are loading in 0.5 – 0.75 secs but the size of the page is 1.8mb and they have way more requests than mine so I think that there is still room for improvement. Some of these pages even have image sliders on them.

So what can I do to improve the pagespeed from here? Id like to get it to load consistently in under 1 sec.
I have a plugin on my site called “redirection” because the site was originaly http: Can this be slowing things down?
Could it be my website hosting thats at fault and can I test for that?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

My current Pingdom stats are:

Performance Grade A92
Load Time: 1.74 sec
Pages Size: 330.1KB
Requests 28

Grade C 78 Add Expires headers
All other grades are 100.
No mention of “Make Fewer HTTP requests” anymore

Content size by content

Image: 208.7KB
Script: 67.0KB
CSS: 42.1KB
HTML: 10.7KB
Font: 1.3KB

Requests by content

Image: 21
Script: 3
CSS: 1
HTML: 1
Font: 1

[Jim]

Use this plugin to host Google Analytics locally. https://wordpress.org/plugins/host-analyticsjs-local/. It will help with removing the warning for google analytics concerning ‘expired headers’. But make sure in the settings for the plugin you move the location of the analytics folder from /cache/caos-analytics/ to/caos-analytics/ (just delete the ‘cache part and remain with /caos-analytics/’ as this prevents your GA file from being cleared when you clear site cache to prevent 404 errors). Also, you can remove google analytics code from your site and let this plugin handle everything when you put your GA ID. Also, consider using WP Fastest Cache (free) over WP Super Cache, but disable all CSS, JS and HTML minification settings since Autoptimize handles those. Then test your site again with page speed. (NB: I don’t work for GP).

[Tom]

What kind of hosting are you using? Shared hosting? PHP 7? It can also depend on the server location and where you’re testing it from (using Pingdom).

[Alan]

Thanks for those suggestions afrocave. I will give that a go 🙂

Hi Tom. Im located in Australia and testing on Pingdom via Sydney. My PHP is version 7.3

I dont know what type of hosting I have but Im thinking that thats the problem.

What I have noticed is that my page is a lot smaller in size but its taking a lot longer to load than other websites.
After looking at the results at Pingdon I’ve noticed that a large chunk of my load time is “waiting”.

786 ms of the time is “waiting” whereas on faster sites with a lot more images etc the “waiting” time is 58.9ms. This seems to be the problem. How can I fix the waiting time?

[Alan]

The test results are also varying considerably and most of the time is waiting time. This test took 2.17s

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gx9d42exhdqerlf/Pingdom1.PNG?dl=0″

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v3u7i9rtfeggr17/Pingdom2.PNG?dl=0″

When I click on my domain and look at the Request Headers it says pragma no-cache, cache-control no-cache. No idea what that means.

[Author]

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