How else can I increase my site speed?

all above are GREAT!

oh yeah.. your first stop is GTMetrix.

iamalphak said:

Hello all, I have a wordpress blog on a vps,

however the site speed is not too great, I have tried numerous things such as optimize plugins for wordpress regarding CSS, js and html, caching plugins, image optimisation plugins and also cloudflares cdn.

have read multiple guides on best configuration settings for all of the plugins...however I still seem to have average site speed.

I have also tried to configure gzip and all other tweaks for my cdn to improve speed but no luck.

I have very little knowledge on how to manually fix the issues when going over most gtmetrics and google page speed analytics, hence the use of plugins and cdn.

Could anyone help me out?

The site is https://lifetactics.blog

Thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

I stumbled on this thread by @Zwielicht and it addresses your question in a detailed manner. I learnt from it myself

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/from-snail-to-cheetah-30-ways-to-speed-up-your-site.761083/

Issue looks like your SSL, it took 452.53 ms to load that. your server waited 88.89 ms before it sent a response which loaded in 0.05 ms. Upgrading your host will be negligible. You may want to look at a faster SSL provider.

If your webpage need external resources you could add a dns-prefetch in your html code. While loading the page content it makes dns-requests to the external resources, and if the webpage needs the resources it already knows the ip's to these resources so it can skip the dns-requests. Check this: https://davidwalsh.name/dns-prefetching
Add this to the header of your webpage: <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//example.com" /> replace example.com with the servername of the external resources and do it for all the external resources your webpage needs.

How many plugins do you currently have on the site? If there are a lot, you may want to remove some. You may not need all of them, which could slow the site down.

Too slow on first load:

Look at these:

The following images are resized in HTML or CSS. Serving scaled images could save 341.0KiB (35% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/desirepart2-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 285x171. Serving a scaled image could save 99.9KiB (50% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/3simpletips-min-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 285x171. Serving a scaled image could save 61.9KiB (50% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Untitled-design-5-min-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 320x192. Serving a scaled image could save 56.7KiB (37% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/desirepart1-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 320x192. Serving a scaled image could save 44.2KiB (37% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Untitled-design-4-min-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 285x171. Serving a scaled image could save 27.9KiB (50% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/artificial-intelligence-3382507_640-590x354.jpg is resized in HTML or CSS from 590x354 to 520x312. Serving a scaled image could save 18.0KiB (23% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/systemoverwillpower-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 380x228. Serving a scaled image could save 9.9KiB (10% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/featured-image-400x240.jpg is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 285x171. Serving a scaled image could save 8.4KiB (50% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/3-SELF-HELP-PRINCIPLESTOEFFECTIVELYHANDLE-ANYONE-1-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 380x228. Serving a scaled image could save 6.2KiB (10% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/bbh.jpeg is resized in HTML or CSS from 560x315 to 520x293. Serving a scaled image could save 4.8KiB (14% reduction).
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/brainpower-2-400x240.png is resized in HTML or CSS from 400x240 to 380x228. Serving a scaled image could save 3.2KiB (10% reduction).


The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 70.2KiB.
site/wp-content/themes/zox-news/font-awesome/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.6.3
use.fontawesome.com/releases/v4.6.3/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2

The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 18.1KiB.
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/lifetacticslogoheader-1.png
site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/lifetacticslogoheader.png

Optimize the following images to reduce their size by 22.3KiB (23% reduction).
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/lifetacticslogoheader-1.png could save 6.3KiB (35% reduction). Download optimized version.
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/lifetacticslogoheader.png could save 6.3KiB (35% reduction). Download optimized version.
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/bbh.jpeg could save 4.0KiB (12% reduction). Download optimized version.
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/featured-image-400x240.jpg could save 2.5KiB (15% reduction). Download optimized version.
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/lifetacticstextlogo2.png could save 2.5KiB (32% reduction). Download optimized version.
Lossy compressing site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/featured-image-80x80.jpg could save 708B (26% reduction). Download optimized version.

Also, check images:

Slow loading site: most of the time its your web server. It can be a vpsbut of you're on the wrong host, no matter what you do, you'll be dissapointed. I see yoursan jose load time = 2.36 seconds. Too slow. Try deactivate your lead capture pop up to see if the loading improve. If it's still the same, move your site to a better host (like siteground).