Hey guys,
I am a novice at this and have been trying to increase site speed for a while now and strangely made it worse with a CDN which has confused me
GTmetrix score is bad even when I change location of the test servers and scale my images with SMUSH.
Much obliged
Site is ebaileyphotography.co.uk
As the Cloudflare cache populates with your files, it will greatly speed up your site. As long as those files stay in cache. But Cloudflare can’t speed up your main page HTML as it’s considered Dynamic Content.
Are you using a Caching Plugin for your site? Something like WP Fastest Cache.
Your logo is also loading over HTTP, which causes a Mixed Content security error. Go back to where you chose that logo and delete its setting (not from the Media Library), then re-add it. It should set it to use HTTPS.
Hey, thanks for replying so quickly
I was using W3 Total Cache, but it was clashing with Cloudflare, so I stopped. When I was was using it before Cloudflare, it was very fast.
-emma
I believe I tried to copy the settings from this blog post:
-emma
How was it clashing? The MaxCDN part is generally unneccessary.
I’m sorry this was a while ago and I got angry and walked away, so I can’t give you the full answer.
I will try again now and see what happens.
OK, so my website is now not loading either desktop nor mobile
Your site looks to be caching important resources that may have changed.
Try clearing the Page Cache on your website’s admin dashboard. And a Purge Everything at Cloudflare Cache.
My favorite caching plugin is WP Fastest Cache. It’s pretty simple and reliable. Just do a basic Page Cache, and not all the minification options. This also applies to W3Tc.
OK
Done all that inc installing WP Fastest Cache
Website is now loading
The performance score are back to awful, is this because I purged the cache?
-emma
A few reloads and it’s pretty well-cached. One last cheat that should be safe:
You can Cloudflare Cache your main page so it will load quickly. As it doesn’t look like there are any user logins, or even content that changes, this should be safe.
Page Rule: Match ebaileyphotography.co.uk/
Setting: Cache Level (Everything), Edge Cache TTL (1 day, or your choice depending on how often you update front page). You can always manually purge Cloudflare Cache if you’re in a hurry after an update.
Thank you, I have implemented that cheat
I will check back in tomorrow and test its performance and see how it’s doing
That looks better. And with all those .js files, have you tried enabling Rocket Loader in the Speed->Optimization section of the Cloudflare dashboard?
Hello! Sorry I stepped away from it
Yes Rocket Loader was enabled yesterday on Cloudflare
Checking performance today and PageSpeed Score is still 48%
When I had W3Tc and no CDN everything was much faster, what do you think is the clash? So far having a CDN has not benefitted me
-emma
Your site is 4.5 megs with 100 requests. Nearly half of those are Javascript, and 20 are CSS files. It’s not efficient, and nothing external is going to fix that. The content is delivered as fast as possible, but the render-blocking is killing your score.
Even on my 500 megabit connection and with everything on your site cached, it’s still a 3.5-second load because of the JS files.
So an inefficient Wordpress theme and too may images on home page?
Thank you for taking the time to help me
-emma
It might not be the theme. It’s usually due to an excessive amount of plugins.
OK I have 28 active, but some of those are important to the theme
Do you rate Smush as an image optimizer?
I will have a clear out of plugins
If your on WordPress platform, I just started playing with “Shortpixel” plugin. I can let you know how that goes. I tried Imagify but it left much undone. Hit me up at [email protected] and let me know how it’s going. If you email me I will keep you posted on my experimentation results.
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