slow website

Have you talked to your host provider? They might be having server issues.

Had a quick look; you should look into the full page download size (1679KB), 52% of which (896KB) are images. You’re also loading a lot of javascript (649KB) and you don’t seem to have Autoptimize activated after all?

you must be using unnecessary plugins . Try deleting those plugins which you are not using .

Thanks Futtta. Autoptimize is active but I’m not sure what the settings should be- I just activated a few. Any suggestions for settings? Any suggestions about what I should do about the images? Thanks

I just deleted all the plugins that were inactive.

as far as Autoptimize is concerned; activate HTML, JS and CSS optimization to start with and see what works (or what doesn’t). If this breaks some stuff (which is not impossible), you can use some of the debug-options (“look only in head” for both CSS & JS and “force in head” and “try/catch wrapping” for JS).

regarding images; there’s some progress to be made by (better) compressing the images (cfr. https://www.webpagetest.org/result/130814_JY_636/2/performance_optimization/#compress_images) but you simply have a lot of images, so the question is if you can do with less?

OK thanks. I had activated a few of those things and they did create errors on the site so I’ll investigate further.

As for the images, is it just the images in our featured slider that are taking a long time to load, or are there other images? Thanks again for your help with this.

https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ – This is a useful site for diagnosing issues with website speeds.

For Autoptimize (I’m the plugin’s maintainer, actually):

1. try “optimize HTML” first, that should break nothing.
2. try “optimize CSS” and:

• if that doesn’t work, try “look only in head”
• if it does work, try “Generate data: URIs for images?”, which you would benefit from greatly when looking at the images being loaded (see below).

• try “optimize JS” and if it doesn’t work:

• try “force in head” and if it still does not work:
• try with “look only in head”
• and finally add “add try/catch wrapping” to see if that solves anything
• if you know some javascript, you can skip some of these previous steps and instead add specific files to the exclusion-list

As far as the images are concerned;

• you have one huge image (416KB; https://www.seattlechamber.com/Libraries/Featured_Events/2867.sflb.ashx)
• a couple of larger images that could benefit from being automatically smushed with smushit.com (or with the great wordpress smushit plugin.
• and a lot of smaller ones used by your theme (which the theme authors should really solve, by using image sprites and/ or data uri’s for background images).

frank