[AmanMember]

Thanks Rich.

[Kade McConvilleParticipant]

Can you still use autoptimize minifi’s and compression if you select these on cloudfare or will that cause similar issues?

Thanks for the guide too!

[RadModerator]

Hi Kade,

You should use minifier one a time only and should have similar result. Only difference should be speed if you will use CDN to host minified files. And that should be faster.

Thanks.

[Kade McConvilleParticipant]

great, thanks for the response! Still tweaking to get that optimum speed! 🙂

[RadModerator]

You’re welcome Kade 🙂

[nj7206Participant]

Hi Adam,

Can you share how you set up the flipbox feature in the ‘Core Services’ section of your website?

Thanks,

NJ

[CharliePryorParticipant]

To add to this… implement your site on Nginx instead of Apache if you can. You obviously need root access with somebody that knows what they are doing to set it up for you… but it’s instantly gratifying knowing you can have thousands of simultaneous visitors on a site that doesn’t even have perfectly optimized images or CDN, and still handle it much better than an apache server getting less than a hundred.

[NicoModerator]

Thanks Charlie for more additional information.

Cheers!

[Jasonmc777Participant]

Great thread, this has helped me make some very notable improvements to page speed

Unfortunately I still have an issue with “first visit load speed time” when the cache is empty, simulating someone going to the site for the first time (which is very important!)

Here are my site ratings after much optimisation, GTMetrix is giving me a double A performance rating, 97% 95%

Test links:

GTMetrix: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/mctengineering.com/RF3j8vNh A 97% A 95% 1.99 second

Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=mctengineering.com&tab=desktop 88/100

Pingdom: http://fpt.pingdom.com/#!/bs4gpn/http://mctengineering.com 1.91 seconds 92/100

If you click on the History Section of the Pingdom test results you will see the problem with “first time visit load speed” it was testing 16 to 18 seconds before and now is reading 10 to 12 seconds, which is Far too much

I would really like to get the first time load speed down to 3 or 4 seconds max and over 5 seconds is too slow imho

Any ideas why this is happening, 1. is it an issue with my host godaddy.com Pro plan (with only 2 low traffic websites on there) or cloudflare? or 2. an interaction between the two 3. an issue with the website itself which seems unlikely as why would it be able to fully load in 2 seconds or less sometimes even on first visit?

Really wondering what the issue is, if I was getting a consistent 3 seconds load time I would be well happy with that

When testing with WebPageTest I usually see a screenshot from cloudflare saying “Error 522” and the load time says around 16 seconds even to the first byte! Error 522 is “connection timed out”

I am using X-Integrity, 1.5mb page size

List of plugins:

Akismet
Cloudflare
Contact Form 7
Limit Login Attempts
P3 (Plugin performance profiler)
Revolution Slider
W3 Total Cache
Wordpress SEO
X-Shortcodes

[Jasonmc777Participant]

I temporarily deactivated cloudflare to hopefully see if the issue is with the host or something else, I noticed that cloudflare was giving a 520 error about 10 minutes ago, hmm will see what I can do about this

[ChristianModerator]

Thanks for sharing Jason. 🙂

[Jasonmc777Participant]

After some more investigation I deactivated cloudflare thinking this was the issue with the high first visit load time, testing since then has been more consistent, I had one high load time since but most of the time it is only 3.5 to 4.5 seconds which is much better and something to build upon

What I noticed is that the redirect from mctengineering.com to > www. takes around 1 second on average which seems strange

Also the ping to my web hosting location is quite high at 180ms, a much closer host has a consistent 38ms ping so I will likely be changing hosting location

As for the page performance test results I further optimised all of the images on the site using this image compressor (which is Excellent!) and saved 54% iirc (for 6 large jpg’s), going from 1.5mb down to 0.893mb landing page size
http://compressjpeg.com/

Results without cloudflare and further image compression:

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/mctengineering.com/ghU9LA4x A 94% B 88%

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mctengineering.com%2F&tab=desktop 79% Mobile – 92% Desktop

Finally I have a good webpagetest.com result:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150603_1R_ZR4/ All A’s without CDN

From all the testing it appears that cloudflare may not be the best option for everyone, and even if you are getting a 100% rating on your image optimisation in the test results you could still have a lot of scope for further compressing your images without any loss of quality

What did I learn from all of this so far?

1*. Maximise image compression, use jpg’s for any static or scrolling images, png’s for higher detail, logo’s etc

2*. Hosting – (Just as important as page optimisation!) choose the best host with the lowest ping result to your home ip or where your customers/visitors are located, if using shared hosting try to locate hosting with the least amount of other websites on the same IP which can speed up your website along with other benefits

Here you can test server ping values in many different countries by entering a website url or ip, which is useful to locate the best servers for your target user area (also check out the “info”section for the host location etc) http://check-host.net/check-ping

This will tell you how many different websites are on the same IP: http://viewdns.info/reverseip/

Cloud hosting is usually much faster than shared hosting by design and is likely the future of hosting, however for small businesses and blog’s etc local low ping value shared hosting can offer good results at a low cost

3*. First visit page loading speed (with your browser cache empty simulating a new user vising your website) is one of the most important tests, if your page takes 1 second to load the 2nd or 3rd+ time yet the first load takes 8+ seconds then visitors are likely to click elsewhere instead, first load time is more important than revisit loading time, and also the time it takes to first display a webpage from the first click is more important than the time it takes to fully load all of the content on the page, people are happy to wait for an initially fast loading page to fully populate afterwards

4*. X-Theme is Awesome! this is my first website and I really like this theme, looking forward to building more advanced WPX sites in the near future

5*. Keep testing learning and refining, I probably have more questions now than when I started but happy to be making improvements that can be measured in the real world

Many thanks to the X-Team for all your efforts
Jason

Ps. here is an interesting google webmaster video about pagespeed & performance vs user experience: https://youtu.be/OpMfx_Zie2g

[KyleKeymaster]

Thanks for sharing, Jason!

[glennyboyParticipant]

Hi All

I’m finding that WP-Super Cache isn’t compatible with X Theme as updates in Cornerstone and Woo Commerce rely on page cache boing emptied before page updates reflect – that’s a real pain. Cornerstone is also incompatible with my SEO plugin, which is Premium SEO Pack (so also not great).

Has anyone else had the same experience and if so has anyone had better lick with another Cache plugin like W3 Total Cache for example?

Cheers

Glennyboy

[JackKeymaster]

Hi there Glennyboy,

Hope you’re well today! Other members are successfully using W3 Total Cache with X, personally I use wp-rocket and it works perfectly with both X and WooCommerce. And includes direct integration with WooCommerce, so the pages are automatically excluded from the cache.

SEO wise, because most SEO plugins check the content in the admin, most report issues with the content, as Cornerstone uses shortcode, there is no SEO impact at all, as Google etc, checks the final front-end markup/source, not the shortcodes like other SEO plugins, which is why most return warnings about titles not being set, or content being too short. We do have a active feature request for Yoast SEO, which hopefully we’ll add in the near future. 🙂

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

[Author]

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