A's on all speed tests, but a 6 second page load time.

Hey all,

This might be a bit of a long post but I wanted to reach out to see if anyone had some advice on improving my page load times.

Before you jump in with the typical recommendations, here me out and see what I've done.

I have a relatively popular image and gif sharing website, Alexa rank around 120kish.

It sits on a VPS server with another site in the same niche, with an Alexa rank around 170k.

Both sites get a decent amount of traffic per day, and both consume quite a bit of bandwidth per month. BUT my server is never under stress. Ram usage is perfect, and load averages are right where they need to be.

The site with Alexa 120kish is the problem site, and will be referred to as Site A from now on. Site B will be the 170k site.

Site A loads incredibly slow, and I have done everything I believe I can in my power to optimize it, yet it's still taking upwards of 5 seconds to load the page, however on every major speed test I've run it through, it's getting A+ ratings on EVERY factor and showing zero recommendations for optimizations.

Site B however loads incredibly fast, it clocks in at around 0.10 seconds and has 5x bigger of a database and 5x more content.

Here's what I've done so far to try and combat these.

- Upgraded both sites to a paid tier 1 cloudflare plan, (mostly for WAF but also for speed benefits, not my first rodeo - it's all configured correctly, lazy loading, expires, etc etc)
- Tinkered with optimizing MYSQL query cache for around a month - saw no improvements
- upgraded to MARIADB, tinkered with query cache optimization tuning for around a month - saw no improvements and eventually disabled it. (sites loaded faster without it)
- Compressed all of the images on the site
- Set the cache and expires correctly
- Tried various caching plugins but most had an issue due to conflicts with cloudflare's caching, resulting in worse load times
- Used WP-Asset Cleaner to clean up anything that I don't need on the page
- Ran repairs and optimizations on the database
- Removed unnecessary plugins and kept only those necessary to run the site
- Checked, double check, triple checked that it was not a server related issue. The server is perfectly healthy, well optimized and quite frankly overkill in terms of it's specs for these two sites.


I should also note that site A is built on Wordpress, and site B is NOT, so it's not easy to mirror everything I have done on site B to site A. They are complete different frameworks.

For further information - Site A has around 40,000 images and gifs on it, and a DB size of around 280MB.

--

If you have any advice or suggestions on anything I can do to try and get these page speeds lower, I would greatly appreciate it. It is unfortunately one of the only factors holding the site back in the SE's right now in my opinion.

I consider myself to be someone very familiar with web development, server optimization, and SEO but this is really stumping me. It's entirely possible I might have missed something important here so if you have ANY advice for me it would be greatly appreciated

Thanks for your time!

- CJ

Tried redis cache?

Also offload images/ gif to a cdn.

Do you have ads installed remove them then

Thanks for the responses everyone.

thatkid1 said:

Tried redis cache?

Also offload images/ gif to a cdn.

Click to expand...

I have not tried redis cache but will certainly give it a go and see if there are any improvements.

Off loading to a CDN is something I really want to do and know would be beneficial, but the bandwidth costs have put me off for the time being as the site does consume quite a lot. Growing pains I guess.

Mr Positive said:

Do you have ads installed remove them then

Click to expand...

I have no ads on the home page, 4 on posts on desktop and 3 on posts on mobile. Have tried disabling them for the sake of troubleshooting in the past but found no improvement.

PureHustle said:

you have to figure out waht exactly is causing the time lag. TTFB? Is the lag on getting a response from the server? maybe the WP theme is heavy? could be any number of reasons.

check the waterfall of your page load. check to see what items are causing the most delay and then fix the problems at hand.

Google tag manager is a great solution if you find out its an external script being called and slowing your site down (makes it load the tags asynchronously).

Click to expand...

After looking at the waterfall a bit, it looks like it very well could be the theme. Which is a bummer because the site is 100% dependent on this theme lol. But I do appreciate this advice, I forgot to check the waterfall before I posted this thread. I should be able to use this and improve it, even if only slightly.

If you don't already have it running on your website, try wprocket. Upon activating my site litterly jumped from 5-6 seconds to 2-3 seconds. There are some guides around what options to activate and which not to activate.

Try @FatBee guide then

Hey everyone, thanks again for all the responses.

One key thing I forgot to mention in the OP is that this is an Apache server, running Nginx via Engintron.

Something that never dawned on me was optimizing Nginx. After getting in there and optimizing it, I'm starting to see significant improvements, so far as much as 3 seconds.

Will continue working on it and report back.

https://tools.pingdom.com/ gives you much better details on how much time each part loading (DNS, server connect ...)

Check if any script or font is loaded from somewhere else on the web. It could be causing the delay.

Show us your GTmetrix's waterfall. Do you lazy load your images? Have you tried using .webp extension instead of jpg, png? You could also check what recommendations Google PageSpeed gives you.

Install Query Monitor, it'll tell you which scripts, styles or anything makes the site load slow from the frontend.

Hey again everyone.

Once again thanks for all the responses.

I just wanted to update and say that it appears the issue has been resolved, and a big thank you to all the input and advice here. After spending a few hours optimizing Nginx, then adding WP Fastest Cache on top of it, issues have been resolved and the site is loading like a rocket. In fact, search traffic and page views is already way up on the day. Just goes to show how much of a difference a faster page makes.

have you tried ezoic ?

CjTheFish said:

Thanks for the responses everyone.



I have not tried redis cache but will certainly give it a go and see if there are any improvements.

Off loading to a CDN is something I really want to do and know would be beneficial, but the bandwidth costs have put me off for the time being as the site does consume quite a lot. Growing pains I guess.

Click to expand...

I was searching for something and I have no idea if this is still relevant or not:

BunnyCDN is dirt cheap and works incredible. I moved there from KeyCDN and I'm never looking back.

Just as others have said it could very well be your theme. Checking the waterfall is important. Keep in mind that, in general, speed tests can help you identify problems but just because you score high or well doesn't mean there aren't underlying issues still causing load/speed performance problems. The tests can easily be tricked.