Site speed...where to focus our attention?

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We have a beautiful looking website http://www.fd-works.co.uk which uses a single page to tell potential customer what we do and how we do it...it brings it's own issues in that the page is slow to load.

Using WooRank bit.ly/1634w6T we have identified a number of issues - I need to understand which are the must do's and which are the nice to haves...any tips or sign posting to 'how to's' or which bit of code needs tweaking would be gratefully appreciated.

Speed tips:
Too bad, your server is not using a caching method
Too bad, your website is using inline styles
Too bad, your website has too many CSS files (more than 4)
Too bad, your website has too many JavaScript files (more than 7)
Too bad, your website does not take advantage of gzip

Using Googles site speed tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.fd-w... we get a score of 39/100 for Mobile and 47/100 for Desktop.

W3C Validity:
Invalid: 6 Errors, 2 Warning(s) - We've used this site to identify the Errors and Warnings...http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=fd-works.co.uk...

Doctype:
Declaring a doc type

Other things that have been flagged:
The 'white space' between the fd-works and images for example...http://www.fd-works.co.uk/themes/fd-works//images...
The is some redundant code that has been <!-- --> out

How long should I expect a developer to take to resolve these issues.

Many thanks in advance for any help or guidance.

All the best

Jonny

 
mhawke replied on at Permalink Reply
mhawke
I see a few things.

1) Most single-page websites all suffer the same thing. The page is very big. I see that your WooRank analysis indicates the page is only 40kb in size but this is clearly wrong. Pingdom.com reports that it is over 3mb in size. This takes time to render and a lot of bandwidth is consumed every time a visitor lands on your site. Folks with internet plans with bandwidth caps learn to avoid sites that consume 3mb per pageload.

2) Your page relies heavily on outside services such as Twitter, Google maps, Vimeo, etc, etc. This can make the speed of your site very dependent on the speed of the various services you are requesting. Often when an outside service changes the way they do things, it can really slow down your site. Twitter did this recently and hurt a lot of sites. Their business model does not often match your business model. They make changes that benefit them not you.

3) All that being said, the number one reason for slow sites is an overloaded, shared hosting plan or a host with slow 'pipes' to the database. I'm not sure who you are hosting with but if your website is critical to your business success, you should at least have no less than a fast VPS hosting plan.
ThemeGuru replied on at Permalink Reply
ThemeGuru
One thing you might want to consider is moving to a different webserver i.e. nginx. Plus looking at using memcache instead of relying on C5's local file cache setup.
Phallanx replied on at Permalink Reply
Phallanx
Easy gains (minutes):

1. Fix the two 404 errors. Errors kill performance and SEO.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140102_QQ_9D8/...

2. Fix the double forward slashes (//). A browser will compensate, but they cannot be cached by offsite caches.

3. Turn on DEFLATE in the .htaccess. This will enable server compression.

4. Set the expiry times for the different mime types in the .htaccess. This will improve your page score (there are examples on these forums).

Moderate effort (hours):

1. Put as much of your javacript at the end of the page as you can. Difficult to do with concrete5 without using a 3rd party tool. But possible.

2. Use CSS sprites for your images. You have lots of very small images that take longer to connect than download.

3. Upgrade concrete5 5.6.0 to the latest. 5.6.0 still had cache issues. If I also remember correctly, 5.6.0 also caused double slashes so it *may* fix item 2 of the easy gains (but don't quote me on it).
Cahueya replied on at Permalink Reply
Search the forums for speed regarding concrete5, besides the already mentioned hints, there are several posts about this topic.

Go search the forums for MISER, one of Phallanx' (numerous) great contributions to the c5 toolkit.

I've read good things about varnish cache too, maybe you can find someone set it up for you?

But as mhawke already wrote, "one-page" sites are usually having a larger volume. So maybe you should keep your expectations adequate to the design. But you are totally right - your site is beautiful - great job by pixelfish!

@themeguru have you tried setting up memcache with c5? I was thinking about it but did not yet try. Any tips on configuration?