I have been optimising my site for load time and have managed to get my site down to <700kb with only 34 requests.
However, it’s still not exactly snappy. On http://tools.pingdom.com/ it is apparently “slower than 75% of tested sites”. Which is strange for a sub-1mb site with not many requests. The site is www.succeedenglish.com. It has just launched and is seeing about 30 visitors per day so it can’t be traffic volume.
The problem I guess is the server. When I run a test on Pingdom, the URL makes up 5.5 seconds of a 6.25 second load time. A similar result is seen on http://www.webpagetest.org/
What does that URL mean? and how can I solve it?
The site is on WordPress with a Bluehost shared plan. I know shared isn’t the best but it should be able to handle such a small site with so few visitors.
I’d really really appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.
After having a look at the speed test on pingdom, I noticed something that is unnecessarily adding 2.2 seconds to the load time. The URL request is being doubled.
Heres why, when you try to access http://www.succeedenglish.com you will notice that your wordpress website is redirecting to succeedenglish.com (without the www).
I did a test without the www and its faster:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dM0eyP/succeedenglish.com
This is because the website URL in the settings found in the WP backend is set without the “www“.
Heres my suggestion, login to the backend of wordpress and update the URL to include the “www”.
You will find the fields to update under “General Settings”. You will have to update 2 fields: “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Site Address (URL)”
That will sort out the unnecessary redirect onload.
However, if you also have images (image URLs) within posts and custom fields (used by some plugins), you would need to update all the URLs throughout the database.
To do this you can use a simple plugin called Velvet Blues Update URLs.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/velvet-blues-update-urls/
You can install it via the WordPress backend and then access the plugin here: Tools -> Update URLs.
What you want to do is replace all “http://succeedenglish.com/” urls with “http://www.succeedenglish.com/“. Please remember to include the “http://”, otherwise you will end up with incorrect URLs, just be cautious
Just be sure to check out the plugins instructions.
This will improve the load time.
Let me know if you come right.