Site speed terrible. 19s load time!

I think it may be that your hosting is generally slow, I can’t pick out one specific thing. You could install the P3 Profiler plugin to see what that throws up.

I’m using Hostgator, which I heard has good speed?

If you’re on a shared hosting plan anywhere, the speed of your site could be adversely affected by your hosting neighbours.

Ok, well I’m running the P3 Profiler, which is way easier than individually turning off and on my widgets to see which one is slowing me down.

Turns out 72% of loadtime is due to plugins, with Jetpack taking up 63% of that. Wow!

Yeah. I know people love it but Jetpack gets nowhere near my sites.

Thank you for that.
Speed has improved slightly since deleting Jetpack, but I’d still like to figure out how to Parallelize downloads across hostnames. Pingdom.com gives me a “0” grade for that.

You could try offloading your static content to a CDN? There are a few freebie/cheap ones knocking around now.

Just looked it up. Looks hard. ??

Well I least I know where to start.

Maybe Cloudinary?

Hi Mutrux;
I’m Autoptimize’s maintainer and got a mail as this post mentions that plugin. Had a quick look, doing a webpagetest.org test of your site.

The main issues seem to be;

1. there’s a huge amount of data being transferred; 1,598 KB = 1.5 megabyte
2. large amount of images; approx 805.2KB (50.9% of total data transferred) is too much. Compressing images (jpeg compression ratio) could save up to 319.8 KB. Having less images (or smaller ones) clearly has a positive performance-impact as well, off course.
3. no CSS/JS aggregation, minification or compression -> you don’t only have to install, but also configure Autoptimize (optimize HTML & CSS should be pretty fail-safe, JS will require some tinkering given the fact you’re doing a lot of jQuery, start with “force in head” and maybe “look only in head” as well, see FAQ for more info)

hope this helps,
frank

Frank,

Thank you for your help. I’ll configure Autoptimize and see if that helps. For the images, do I need to go in and resize them all individually? Or is there some faster/better way to do that?

Obviously, I need to have photos on the site. Maybe hosting them somewhere else?

You can install WP Smush.it, which can bulk-smush your images, but the gains won’t be as important as when you manually compress them. There apparently are other WordPress plugins that do better then smush-it, but I don’t have experience with those.

Hosting images on another URL (even if not a real CDN) might make a difference indeed, as it allows a browser to initiate more downloads at the same time.

Frank,
I installed Cloudinary as WPRanger suggested, which brought my image compression from a D to B! That worked great.
Except now my First Byte Time went from a C to and F. Can anyone tell me what affects First Byte Time? Is this a problem with my host?

–I have yet to configure Autoptimize

Check out the test

Thanks for the help!