Right now I'm paying 5 dollars a month for hosting to godaddy.com. Although there are no users registered yet (it's closed for maintenance mode as I'm testing and buiding it), it's slower than e.g. facebook. Does anyone have experience on using buddypress? What happens if my site blows up and draws a lot of users very fast. I guess I can get more expensive and better quality hosting, but is there a limit for buddypress based sites, especially when I'm using quite a few plugins.
BuddyPress scales quite high, so the code itself won't be a problem, even with tens of thousands of users. Your problems will probably be imposed by your host--limiting database transactions or sizes of tables--or specific themes taking a long time to render.
Firebug can be a great tool to use if you want to identify what component is causing a site to be slow. Instructions on using Firebug
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We have started to use Lighthouse to track the improvements we make to our sites. While this seems to work quite well for desktop sites, i.e. we see the values improve over time and as we make changes, for mobile sites the values remain consistently low. We do repeat the tests and use the best of three, but still.
Below, we have the results of the New York Times mobile site that appears to perform badly vis-a-vis the desktop site. The other two are sites of ours, the main site and the third one being our own.
Browsing the site (as well as the NYT, of course) this apparent bad performance cannot be felt at all.
The test procedure:
run same test three times for each site
mobile
no PWA
incognito mode
Now, while initially enthusiastic about Lighthouse's capability to evaluate a site by attributing aggregated figures that are easy to digest by management, we have the impression that they are not actually useful as they don't correspond to the users' reality and don't change even though we make changes.
Also, this being a Single Page Application, the first load of the page may take some more time, but any further navigation is quasi-instantaneous. We could not find a Lighthouse feature to take this into account.
No, you can't really rely on Lighthouse. As you've observed, well known fast websites perform badly in tests. While there are some reasons for this, it won't help you measure the actual loading speed. Caching being an important factor. Lazy-loading sometimes is confused as not yet loaded. So even if your website is loaded, Lighthouse might detect missing pieces and deem it not yet loaded.
Pingdom is great for that, and provides you with the options to test different regions, which I believe to be more realistic than one server fits all.
Also the Legacy version of GTmetrix is great because it points you directly to what improvements you can make but it tests only from Canada (unless you buy the PRO version). It takes caching into account.
I have been using PSI for mobile on our sites and worked well. Atleast mobile score was always better than lab data & my motivation was report was consistent on some external sites like https://covid19.ca.gov/.
Coming to tool works well for initial load but does not take into affect for one page app since cls is continuous evaluation has user scroll through CLS changes that is not simulated in tool. That is where field data differs.
Thanks,
Yet my site pages load very slowly. Usually there's a 2-3 second lag before the page renders, and I cannot figure out why.
My site is powered by Wordpress v3.4.2.
I'm on a dedicated virtual server with plenty of resources and
bandwidth.
There are no huge images loading.
My CSS files load before JS scripts.
I've spent a lot of time trying to optimize the site within the constraints of the platform (Wordpress + plugins, etc). I don't expect my site to be SUPER fast, but I need it to not be SO slow.
I'm using Chrome's developer tools to audit my site but the suggestions do not appear to explain the long load time (unused CSS rules, etc). When I look at the timeline, I see a 2.7x second load time initially but I can't figure out why. Can anyone help me get to the bottom of this?
My site is located here. The homepage has some extra scripts, so it may be more helpful to look at this page.
I found this superb guide which really helped me fight through the mire of optimising Apache for use with WordPress:
http://thethemefoundry.com/blog/optimize-apache-wordpress/
You said you have a virtual server so chances are it's currently set up to load EVERY module - you'll find a great speed boost here if you eliminate unnecessary modules. Keep a backup of your config file in case you screw it up.
Also - use the TOP command through SSH to see how much memory PHP is using. Probably a lot currently. This will all be improved through eliminating modules as per above link. You don't mention how much memory you have on your VPS but there's a good chance your performance issues are coming from memory thrashing which will be mitigated significantly by reducing how much memory each PHP instance consumes using the link above.
Also, it matters to find out where your performance issues are actually coming from – a great little plugin called WP Tuner helps me locate performance bottlenecks. The original plugin is incompatible but someone else has written an upgrade:
http://www.wwvalue.com/tuts/tut-wp/wordpress-profiler-tuner-revised.html
That will help you identify which specific parts of the page are taking the longest to load so you will immediately find your performance bottleneck.
In addition, a cool plugin called Debug Queries is useful for tracking down performance issues although the wordpress profiler above actually does track queries too.
Finally – I can’t recommend highly enough this WordPress.org discussion on performance, and specifically on W3 Total Cache vs Super Cache (both are excellent).
It’s a fantastic read for anyone looking for split-second response times:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-super-cache-vs-w3-total-cache
I use W3 total cache on one of my sites and WP Super Cache on another. Both are great. I used both so I could learn about both. I would say use WP Super cache plus all the other tools the guy at the link above recommends if you're looking for extreme performance, but if you're looking to get immediate performance W3 total cache is more comprehensive in its initial setup.
Hope that helps.
use caching plugin,
put JS files at the bottom,
try different webhost (DB server may be slow sometimes)
minify css and JS,
make fewer HTTP requests
make sure external services (like FB and others) are not slowing down (remove
them and see if it helps)
run Yslow or similar test
try to use typekit or google font instead of cufon
Have you tried http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/ or a similar caching plugin?
I am in the process of speeding the perceived load time of a website specifically aimed at the mobile platforms (iPhone primarily, Android secondarily, who cares about the rest...) I have already tried several general techniques for speeding load times for normal websites but I was wondering if anyone had specific pointers for the mobile web performance.
I am already bundling scripts, spriting images, lazy loading as much as possible, putting fixed sizes on things, linking css in the head etc. I want insights specifically for mobile.
For example I have heard that the iPhone will only cache files less than 25k so sometimes splitting a script/file into 25k chunks may give an overall boost since now they can be cached even though it caused additional connections to be made. Any other insights like this would be much appreciated.
Also, does anyone know of a good tool to test the load times in iphone?)
Ok, here's some measuring tools for you...
Steve Souders' mobile bookmarklet - http://stevesouders.com/mobileperf/mobileperfbkm.php (a bit limited on he timing front but has lots of interesting other features)
Stoyan Stefanov's iOS app for exploring page load - http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/i-see-http/ (very new, so not sure about it's limitations)
3P Mobile have their own iOS browser in beta that produces waterfalls - Android version was very good.
As far as optimisation goes...
The mobile cache may be small but you still have access to localstorage i.e. include CSS/js inline and extract and save to local storage - Bing mobile does this.
DataURIs are another way of reducing requests but of course the user loses the option to turn off images
Ensure you make good use of keep-alive and connection pipelining - splitting between multiple hostnames can get in the way of these so be careful if you do this.
Caching varies wildly between different phones an OS versions saw an article on it recently will see if I can find it again.
Yahoo! has a nice page about how to squeeze the most performance out of your site.
They also have a Firefox plugin (YSlow) that automatically checks whether your site follows them and suggest improvements. That plugin covers also performance problems that may affect mobile browsers.
I'd like to answer your call for a mobile web site profiling tool - WebDevTools:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.voltcode.webdevtools
disclaimer - I am connected to the company that released this software
While not being targeted for iphones, you could definitely test on various android models and get the load times.
From my experience, IPhone 4+ will load pages the same or better than HTC Desire and similar - both in general speed, but also in HTTP concurrency, etc.
Check out this testing solution:
Tutorial: Does Your Website Load in 3 Seconds?
http://blog.testobject.com/2013/09/does-your-website-load-in-3-seconds.html
I've noticed major music festivals (at least in Australia) and other events that experience a peak in traffic when tickets go on sale have huge problems keeping their websites running well. I've seen a few different techniques used to try combat this such as short sessions and virtual queues but they dont seem to have much effect.
If you were to design a website to sell a lot of tickets in a short amount of time how would you handle scalability? What technologies and programming techniques would you use?
My experience is in the Microsoft stack so answers that in that area will be most useful to me but I'd also like to hear how this sort of problem could be solved on other platforms.
I think the main problem is not that it's "hard" to make such a system scalable, it's that 99% of the time, those sites don't have much traffic. It's not much good buying 50 front end servers and 10 database servers if 99% of the time, they're all idle.
Personally, I'd use something like Amazon EC2 or even Microsoft's new Azure service so that they can run with minimal capacity most of the time, and then ramp up just before a big event goes on sale.
My manager wants to know the speed of our website and its load times in different locations of the world, according to some speed testing websites / tools.
What are the standard tools / procedures for this?
WebPageTest is a pretty awesome tool way more detailed than Gomez. Waterfall charts, repeat loads, and even videos of how a page loads. It has a few locations and connection speeds you can choose from. It seems to be down right now, but will probably be back up soon.
Gomez is a tools that I've used at a couple of organizations. It will monitor your site at timed intervals from a list of nodes that you select, for either an individual page or over an entire transaction (think a click-path through your website)
The reporting capabilities are really good, and you can drill down into individual page requests to identify any performance bottlenecks or issues with site performance. There's also alerting options and the list of nodes and update frequency is excellent.
I've never been involved in the actual purchasing or account management however, so I'm not sure how expensive it is.