Frequently Asked Question

Slow or Optimizing Your Site? A Few Tools To Help.
Last Updated 6 years ago

We often see questions related to site speed or site optimization. We recommend before creating a ticket, that you try a few of these tools first. 

1) www.pingdom.com

This site allows you to test your sites speed from multiple points around the globe. How useful? Well, if you were to check your site speed while on vacation in say Papua New Guinea you might be alarmed that your site is slow. But by going to Pingdom, and checking your site speed from San Jose, you'll be happy to see that your site is quite speedy!


2) www.gtmetrix.com

This site allows you to see in much finer detail what is going on in the background as well as each page on your site. Use it for optimization or to see what is potentially causing slowness.

Page Speed and Yslow tabs: These two tabs will give you some good clues at where to begin to look for optimizing things. 

Waterfall tab: This is incredibly insightful and eye opening. This will show where your site pings out to get information. If you run ads on your site, this will show where each of the requests go to, as well as exactly how long each of those requests take. It is fairly accepted knowledge that ads will slow down your site. A great way to test that is by going to a page without ads or turning them off temporarily, run the test, then turn them back on. You may be shocked to see that without ads your site is speedy and with them on, 15 seconds or more load time is added! In these situations we can't provide support to fix that, you will have to get with your ad provider to look at it.

3) Have files that we are serving on CDN? Please know that those items coming off our servers are in HTTP/2. This is an important consideration, as it has improved our speed, and more importantly yours by at least 10%. There are many companies, like ad companies, who are not yet pointing out their files in HTTP/2. So please ask these services if they have upgraded to that, especially if they are giving advice about optimization, or saying slowness is not them. Often enough it is and you can see it on the above waterfall tab in gtmetrix! If you would like to read up about HTTP/2 here's the link HTTP2 FAQ

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