Site load times

[MPC]

A few of you hinted that load times might affect site rankings, or is going to in the future. I'm curious as to what you are getting in terms of load times.

One of my site, which was all tightly coded in notepad, takes an average of 1.6 seconds to load and this is better than 76% of websites (according to google webmaster tools). I have another site on the same server that uses CMS. Load times on this on are 4 seconds, which is 65% SLOWER than other sites, and that concerns me. Since both sites are on the same server, I am assuming that the performance difference is strictly due to code and images being loaded correct? Because it's a CMS (Wordpress), I assume there's little tweaking I can do to improve that load time. So what is the solution? Better hosting?

[Bryan]

better hosting, or you could also try a caching plugin.

[JTJagger]

Hi MPC,

You affiliate types, always thinking in terms of search engines

You want your site to load more quickly to better convert. Quick loading sites are better for the end user, which search engines also appreciate. Design for users, and the search engines will reward you accordingly.

With CMSes there are many MORE ways you can optimise than with a static HTML site. Specifically (CMS-generic):

1. how many requests are needed per page?
2. how many images are on the page?
3. how many external stylesheets? Are they minimised and compressed?
4. how many external Javascript pages? Are they minimised and compressed?
5. are you using images in menus or headings where you could otherwise use CSS?
6. how large is the entire front page (including all external sheets, images, HTTP headers)?

CMS-internal
6. how long is the system taking to prepare each page?
7. are there any caching options available to you? This is a big question and how this is approached depends on the specifics of the website.

This is just scratching the surface.

If you posted your exact website we could probably help you further.

JT

[MPC]

You affiliate types, always thinking in terms of search engines

Yes, they run my life! hehe!

Are they minimised and compressed?

Since I don't know how that's done, I'm going to say "no"

site is mypokercorner dot com

[sipka]

Best way to find out what is slowing down your site is to install the Page Speed or Yslow tool for Firefox's firebug. That will show you in bits what can be improved on your site.

Some warnings I saw while running the tool on your site:
- Specify image dimensions
- Minimize DNS lookups
- Combine external CSS
- Enable gzip compression (this alone enabled will speed up your site by huge amount)

etc...

[JTJagger]

site is mypokercorner dot com

Ok, I've had one of my guys have a quick look.

Basically, there is a fair bit of room for improvement.

1. You're loading 66 objects. This is what is primarily causing the delay. The browser needs to request each independently, and each request requires HTTP headers back/forth and wait time. Look to change images to text where possible (the "search" button, "view latest content" button, for example, can be made to look almost identical using CSS). The footer is an image when it's seemingly just simple text.

2. As above, you're loading 4 CSS files. There's no reason to be doing this. Combine them, minify (remove unnecessary whitespace, comments), and compress with gzip. Check out minify, which will do this for you: minify - Project Hosting on Google Code

3. Worse -- you're loading NINE Javascript files. Again, use the above method and you've immediately turned 4 CSS+9 Javascript files into 2. That's already an 16% reduction in object requests.

4. Gzip. All modern browsers can handle this. There's no reason to be sending out uncompressed HTML/JS/CSS. You can speak with your webhost to gzip at the httpd level, or a simple websearch for "wordpress gzip" produced several modules that will do exactly what you need (though I have no first hand experience with any).

Your base HTML page is actually quite small, and will load quickly, which is excellent. However, you're not correctly using height and width tags for your images, so the site doesn't look correct "enough" until the images load. I would go back and add these tags so at least the page looks correct when it's partially loaded.

That's all I have for now -- which seems enough for you to work with for now -- but when you're ready to fine tune further, check out Yahoo's docs at:
Exceptional Performance

Hope this helps.

JT

[TheDonk]

Wow, kick-ass thread you guys have started here...keep going!

[MPC]

Thanks you so much for the info. I don't understand half of it, but at least I know what topics to research! lol! I'll figure it out

EDIT: I will update this thread with interesting links I come across.

[MPC]

Interesting basic article on gzip compression

How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression | BetterExplained

[MPC]

Compressing your css file:
Optimize and Compress CSS Files