calling all site speed experts (wordpress)

[lunchboxdiet]

Hi there.

I've just found out that my site is performing very badly in webmaster tools and I need to get this sorted asap!

If you could help could you possibly drop me a PM with your experience etc! I feer that i've clogged up my site with plugins etc and other things are going on.

I really need an expert to help me on this one to get my ranking up ASAP.

My site is www.lunchboxdiet.co.uk

Thanks

Simon

[Gary Becks]

Who are you hosting with and how many sites are on the server? If it is shared hosting then that is where the problems starts.

Next thing you want to look at is getting some sort of caching plugin installed asap. I like quick cache.

You might want to take a look at having phpaccelerator installed as well if you are running the site from your own server.

There's plenty more things you could do but those are the basics and should get you off to a good start.

[Abledragon]

Another Caching plugin is W3-Total-Cache, which is what I'm using. I reviewed it here:

W3 Total Cache Plugin Review | WealthyDragon

If you don't want to use a caching plugin you can activate Gzip - that's pretty effective too:

Gzip Compression: Speeding Up Site Load Times | WealthyDragon

Cheers,

Martin.

[yukon]

I think your problem is the ton of javascript your running!

Why so much javascript for such a simple page?

Adding a cache plugin isn't going to help, I'm 99% sure it's the javascript killing your page loading speed. A cache plugin will still have to load all that javascript.

I would also slice that large (howtolosebellyfat.jpg) header image to help it load faster.

[clickbump]

I agree with what Yukon said. To help illustrate the point, you've got 239 lines of "code" before you have one word of meaningful "content".

And that's being extremely generous, since I'm not even including the linked js files that you are loading, again, before one line of searchable content.

You've likely got 1000s of lines of code before google bot ever gets to your purpose statement...

"Are You Ready To Lose Belly Fat?"

"No, but I'd sure like to trim all the fat from this page!"

The good news is that once you get to that point, your page is *fairly* clean in terms of markup (with one puzzling exception, see below). However, there's so much "noise" before the "signal" that your content is like a beacon in the middle of an ocean of code.

I would start with removing all the non-essential script in the head of your template, once you've done that, your signal to noise will be in better balance and you should see some improvement in rankings.

Also, this is the worst usage of css class referencing I've ever seen (and could potentially get your page deindexed for keyword stuffing)..

<div class="post-1532 page type-page hentry tag-2c tag-addiction tag-amp tag-bbc tag-boost-energy tag-boredom tag-calorie-counting tag-cameron-diaz tag-celebrity-diet tag-confusion tag-constant-struggle tag-daily-telegraph tag-deadly-diet tag-designer-jeans tag-diet-dieting tag-diet-pills tag-diet-plans tag-diet-secret tag-diet-system tag-dieter tag-diets tag-easiest-diet tag-elle-magazine tag-fab tag-falling-off-the-wagon tag-festive-party tag-free-lunch tag-free-weight-loss tag-gold-star tag-goodness tag-healthy-diet tag-healthy-eating tag-healthy-weight-loss tag-healthy-weight-loss-diet-plan tag-hips-and-thighs tag-hollywood-diet-secret tag-hunger tag-jamie-oliver tag-kn tag-losing-belly-fat tag-losing-weight tag-lunch-box tag-lunchbox tag-lyn tag-marie-claire tag-metabolic-rate tag-mso tag-nev tag-orphan tag-party-dress tag-party-dresses tag-plastic-container tag-portion-control tag-portion-sizes tag-proper-portion tag-regu tag-right-choices tag-s-media tag-secret-combination tag-secret-women tag-sexy-cameron-diaz tag-simon-lovell tag-skinny-jeans tag-snack tag-special-offer tag-star-results tag-starvation-diet tag-style-definitions tag-style-name tag-sugar-foods tag-temptations tag-times-new-roman tag-trie tag-weight-loss-diet tag-weight-loss-diet-plan tag-weight-loss-programs tag-weight-loss-system tag-weight-loss-tips tag-world-usa tag-yo-yo tag-ystem" id="post-1532">

[Sodaware]

I highly recommend the W3 Cache plugin, but any cache plugin will make a huge improvement to the base WordPress install.

I'd also recommend checking your site out with WebPageTest.org. It gives a detailed breakdown of the problem areas, and the W3 cache plugin has settings for most of the areas.

A quick run of your site shows you have a lot of CSS and JS files (probably from various plugins) which will slow things down. I'd recommend you configure w3 to serve a minified version of the combined JS & CSS. That alone would reduce the number of requests from 24 to about 3. Add in some gzip compression and browser cache headers and you'll see some decent improvements.