Restaurant site loading
I really focus on loading and optimization of websites and have looked at
WP based websites a lot.
I use YSlow from Yahoo as a Firefox Firebug extension and Google's PageSpeed to look at Classipress in particular.
There are many things that can be improved and SHOULD be improved at myrestaurants.com.au/.
The first visit of a browser to the Home page reads like this in YSlow:
The page has a total of 202 HTTP requests and a total weight of 688.6K bytes with empty cache
When the Home page is visited for the second time in my browser, using so-called "prime cache" to load the same page, the HTTP requests for different files to make up that page are still registering HTTP Requests - 184
On the first visit for anyone 202 files must be retrieved and loaded, most of them in a one-by-one sequence to display the home page. This is separate javascript, css stylesheets, javascripts that may also call for OTHER javascripts to be called for and loaded, images, icons...
And as I look at the installation deeper and deeper with YSlow and PageSpeed I see a lot of systemic reasons for a slow load.
ON THIS POINT:
One thing has come into being over the past 7 years or so that is a very poor trend for website performance.
The reliance on "goodies" and "trackers" and "google ads".
So often I see people have loaded their pages with so many extra http calls to third-party sources that the page stays blank, the browser will not display the page until every single last gif and
js has responded and downloaded.
You can go into source and see that ALL of the code for a page has already loaded, enough to display just fine, except that a google ad has not responded yet.
Or a tracker script.
So while you are poring through all your "page performance" statistics to see who has come and from where and how long they stayed and where they went, a lot of those unique visitors have given up on seeing your website before lunchtime and have moved on to some other source.
I could write a book on how bloated standard websites have become and Wordpress sites are PRIME offenders because they make it so easy to download and install 35 groovy gizmos that slow your page load to a crawl.
Or they make your hosting provider shut you down to let their servers cool off.
It is not easy to take the load off and it has taken me two weeks to methodically pare away things and optimize scripts on my test site until the common problems that so many Wordpress related sites fall prey to do not show up in my test scores.
myrestaurants.com.au/ has a lot of optimization needs--it is not just the problem of a slow server.
It might be an interesting project for one site to be picked and optimized for the benefit of the rest of us.
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Originally Posted by dallas
