Need some help to improve my sites loading time

by 9 replies
12
Hello Warriors

Imagine that, my site disappeared post Penguin and I'm kind off nervous since then to get back on the first page, where I belong

After all, 11k of sales gone isn't that funny.

Anyhow, I read a tutorial regarding website loading time and could see, checked over website tool, that my site has a TERRIBLE loading time, up to 7,5 seconds, way more then Google likes to see.

So as I run WP, I tried to look into chaching my site BUT researching cache plugins I could see that there are some problems with the W3 plugin on shared server etc.

I then tried to go over something like LZIP (or some like that) where I should add some code into my header.php file.

Here I found out that ProfitTheme doesn't have a header.php

So I'm a bit lost to be honest and would like to ask you guy's a safe way to improve my sites loading speed.

Some a tech dummy like myself can do without to destroy his WP site.

Many thanks in advance

G.
#website design #improve #loading #sites #time
  • Hi,

    Good that you're using Wordpress you should at least try to install W3 Total Cache as it helps speed up things very considerably and hopefully it will work on your setup!
  • Try any or all:

    #1 - Shrink the size of your image files so they don't take so long to load. There are plugins that can do this for you, or you can use image editing software. Huge images are one of the biggest reasons for slow websites.

    #1a - Remove unnecessary pictures and content entirely.

    #2 - Test your website speed using different themes. It could be that your theme is poorly coded. Some themes load much faster than others.

    #3 - Purchase and use a CDN (content delivery network) like CDN - Content Delivery Network Services by MaxCDN Content Delivery Network. A CDN serves the static files (images, pictures, css files, videos) on your website from a content server network, so your web server only has to deal with PHP queries. You'll need to use W3 Total Cache to integrate the CDN. It's relatively straightforward and will dramatically speed up your website.

    #4 - Get better hosting. Sign up for a VPS and move your website there. You'll generally need to purchase a midrange VPS (around $50/mo) to get faster speeds than shared hosting, but on the plus side all the resources you purchase will be available to your websites at all times.

    FYI the link in your footer is dead.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Could you post a link? Also, don't jump the gun going to a VPS. If any of it is hosting related you are most likely hosting with a host that is overloading their servers.
    • [1] reply
    • Didn't know that I can post the link, here it is

      Quickbooks University Training Tutorials

      What I could manage today was getting that LZIP thing working.

      That had a mayor improvement in speed, about 50% faster then prior to using that.

      As I didn't had a header.php in Profits Theme, I got it running over the wp_config.php

      In case some of you like to try that, here are the steps

      1 - check your websites speed first here at Pingdom Tools

      2 - Check if your host hast LZIP enabled. Do this over uploading a test.php file into your domain (yourdomain.com/test.php) with the code in it

      3 - Go into your browser and look up that file at yourdomain.com/test.php

      you should get a overview over your php settings with the ZLIP info close to the the bottom, some like this


      4 - If LZIP is enabled, you can then go into your wp-config.php file and add following code to it

      What should cut loading speed in half, at least for me it did that.

      And RickKent, thanks for the great overview of the options, appreciated it.

      G.
  • That initial delayed load and long wait time when clicking links feels like a tell tale sign of poor mySQL performance. After you review the suggestions below, I'd suggest you find a new web host that doesn't overload their servers. BlueHost is notorious for this, as are all of the other unlimited hosts. It may sound biased, since I own as web hosting company, but the actions speak for themselves...in your case, a poor performing jam packed server.


    Here's an on page audit from Chrome.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • This is spot on.

      There's greater database problems than that though, evidenced by what I saw when I entered the qbuniversity.org url into Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. You can see this below:



      It does look like the server is choking hard on database queries.

      Ok, now I'm seeing it when I visit with a browser...



      Another thing to consider is that the home page of qbuniversity.com shouldn't require the database to be queried in the first place. Everything on that home page is cacheable, and for best performance a static copy of the page should be stored and ready to be sent out the door whenever somebody requests it.

      In other words, there's no sense in wasting time querying the database and assembling all of the content of the page for each and every page hit if the page never changes.

      bwh, you should probably get somebody who knows what they're doing to set up an effective caching system for your site and/or get some hosting that can handle heavier loads. As kingfish stated, the hostmonster/bluehost server you're on doesn't seem to be up to the task of effectively handlng the database load your site has. You would probably notice a great improvement though if your site just stopped all of its unnecessary database queries.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Holy macro mojojuju

    where does that error come from?? I never got such a message.

    Does that mean that you can't see my site from your end? I never had such a problem.

    And I agree that all on that page can be cached, I actually thought that Profit Theme does that as it has a cache.php file with all the images etc. in it.

    The fact that shared server aren't so good is indisputable, but you know when you start out online, 99.9% chances that you land at a shared server.

    They have a upgrade option to dedicated IP, maybe I should look into this? What you think?

    Or does that change anything at all, same servers?

    Guess, I'm a total idiot when it comes to those issues.

    G.
    • [1] reply
    • I can see your site fine now. But it's slow, even when clicking on links to pages which I visited before. They're not stored in my browsers cache and my browser is fetching a new copy of the page (which hasn't changed) each time.

      Yeah get someone to do that for you. That site could use it.

      Shared hosts aren't necessarily bad, as I think Kingfish touched upon. It's just when they're overloaded that shared hosting becomes a problem.

      There's a ton of sites on the same server as yours over at Hostmonster. According to this page there's about 2,000 domains hosted on that server (I don't know about the accuracy of that, but there's a lot of sites on that server). Granted, it's probably a big machine and most of those domains receive next to no traffic, but the server has limits.

      True, most people do land at a shared hosting provider when they start off, but it's usually these overloaded mass-market providers who stuff as many customers on a server as they can get away with.

      That won't do anything as far as your site's problems are concerned.

      Well, you're asking questions, and that's a good thing to do.
      • [1] reply
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