Site loads slowly

[Lance O.]

The following site developed in PW loads very slowly. I updated PW to 2.7.1, but I don't know if that is the culprit, since the client told me that the site was loading slowly for a couple of days before the upgrade.

The site is hosted on Media Temple Grid and is using PHP 5.5.21. Both the public site and the PW admin load slowly. Media Temple has suggested adding a MySQL GridContainer.

Any ideas? This is the first time I've encountered this problem, and I honestly don't think PW is to blame. Currently, I don't have caching enabled, but even if I did, that wouldn't help the PW admin. Anyone else hosting on Media Temple?

http://richrosendale.com/

[Mike Rockett]

I remember this site, and specifically remember how fast it used to load...

I take it you haven't made any other changes? I would assume something has changed on the Media Temple side. This is definitely not a DNS issue - that resolves in about 1.5s here, which is a bit slow, but not slow as the server waiting time of 9.6s.

[rick]

Not hosting on media temple, so can't help you there. But the site does load very slow for me too.

Nice looking site, btw.

The images are loading very slow, between 408ms to 951ms each, on average, each time I view the site. This is not good, especially since your image sizes (KB) are small.

Just based off this info, it would appear to be an issue with the particular server. Is this shared hosting?

[Lance O.]

Yes, shared hosting. Not my choice, since I always recommend ServInt VPS for hosting. I'll contact the client and let him know that his hosting plan needs upgrading.

Thanks for the compliments on the site!

[pwired]

That site has an image bottleneck

total page size 3,73 Mb
33 requests for 3,2 Mb images
time spend (location dulles va usa) for image content requests 51,58%

Do you doubt your host ? There are plenty of free online test servers out there so you can compare with your host.

I suggest to start checking how you have your image dimensions specified and from there on walk through your setup

and recheck your site to pinpoint this image bottleneck:

[Peter Knight]

Have you run it through Google Page Speed insights? or Gtmetrix etc?

It's not your hosting.

[horst]

I know this site too. In the past it has loadded "normally" fast. There must have definetly something changed, ServerSoftware or SiteCode.

The initial request can take up to 10 seconds. Here is the culprit. Do the server provides PHP as included Apache-Module, or as fast-cgi?

[LostKobrakai]

It's might be true that images are slowing down the site, but 2.5 s and more time to first byte is definitely not an image issue.

[pwired]

So there are two bottlenecks, the Image part and the Request / Server treatment part

[DaveP]

Just ran this site through YSlow and you could help the images (and html & js) with a bit of .htaccess wizardry - see this post.

[pwired]

No images have defined sizes. The width and height you specify should be the same as the source image not just 100%.

Resize and optimize an image first in an image editor. Better not but if you have to then second resize in the backend

or use css for resizing in the browser. I think you should try another test host for comparing the TTFB part.

Common issues for a TTFB delay on shared hosting are it's reached shared capacity.
 

[Christophe]

PageSpeed Insights:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Frichrosendale.com%2F&tab=mobile

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Frichrosendale.com%2F&tab=desktop

https://tinypng.com/

https://tinyjpg.com/

NB: suggestion -> in .htaccess, enable the redirection from domain.tld to www.domain.tld (or the contrary).

Edit: didn't know it was using FastCGI, and now CGI...

[Lance O.]

Image bottleneck or not, if the PW admin is loading slowly, there must be another issue. This site didn't load this slowly in the past. Images are uploaded via the studio that designed the site, so I don't have complete control over what gets added.

The site was originally using 5.3.29 FastCGI, but was changed to 5.5.21 CGI (latest).

I just added that bit of wizardy to the .htaccess file as DaveP suggested. Seemed to make a little bit of a difference, but the backend still loads slow.