Advice on slow website

[Matt141980]

Not sure if this should be here or in computers & gadgets - I wonder if anyone who knows about Wordpress websites might be able to give a bit of an insight into why the home page of our website is so slow to load?

I'm guessing it's to do with the amount of pictures on the page but all seemed to be ok until a couple of weeks ago. As far as I know nothing of note has changed on the home page so not sure what's going on.

The site is www.magpiesnest.co.uk if anybody would be able to shead any light on it then it would be much appreciated.

Any other constructive criticism on the site in general would be good too. I know it's not particularly SEO friendly at the moment. It's something we plan to look at next year but want the site it's self to be right beforehand.

Thanks in advance!

[BrabusMog]

I'm not a techy type person but I clicked the link out of curiosity. The first time it took a few seconds longer than I'd expect to load on my MacBook Air but second time it loaded up pretty much straight away. I'm not into bags and scarves but layout seems ok to me, if it was mens clothes and trainers I'd certainly take a look around.

[anonymous-user]

Firefox used to have an extension cal;led firebug. This allowed you to navigate to a web site and it would show you how long each element of your page took to load. You then sorted out the bits that were slow and you could increase the speed. I think firebug was replaced with something else a while ago but try a tool like that which will load your site and tell you why it is slow. Then fix those slow bits. It could be your hosting company of course.

Edit: Sorry missed the post above which is saying the same sort of thing.

[Matt141980]

Thanks for the pointers, I’ll have a look into developer tools in Chrome tomorrow with a bit more time. The power of the windows machine it’s viewed on seems to make a big difference to page loading time.
My cheap Win 10 laptop maxes out CPU use for about 7-8 seconds before the page loads where my Win 7 desktop with more RAM and i5 processor manages it in 2-3 seconds. Looking at other similar shopping sites doesn’t have much difference in load times between the two machines.

No idea if it’s just a trait of a cheap slow machine or something deeper going on?

[RoadRailer]

GTMetrix does a good site analysis

Hope that helps.

[chandler99]

try disabling all plugins and see if the site still loads slow, this will help to point out if the delay is caused by a plugin or the theme.

If the site loads fine without any plugins turned on, turn them back on one at a time and re-test each time.

Its also worth looking at the support forms for your theme to see if there any any tips or suggestions. Here's one i found to do with some performance options on rev slider.. https://www.themepunch.com/revslider-doc/performan...

[ecs]

As others have said, the time it takes for the page to load is quite slow. You'll struggle to get good performance from WordPress itself, and I see you're using W3 Total Cache and WP Minify. These won't really help you out as they require quite a lot of I/O and you've already got a slow server. You've got a lot of assets (JavaScript files, images, styles, e.t.c.) loading over HTTP 1.1 too which is why the render time is so poor. Over HTTP 1.1 the max number of connections is between about 6 and 10 depending on the browser so all these assets will be blocking each other and the page won't render until everything has downloaded.

About the best thing you could do to start with is get rid of W3 Total Cache and WP Minify and get the site loading from a CDN. This will give you proper caching using a dedicated caching server so subsequent page loads will be much quicker. I'd recommend using Cloudflare as it'll upgrade the connection to HTTP 2.0 which gives you a multiplexed connection to the server and all the assets can download simultaneously, you get HTTPS for free (though you'll still need an SSL certificate for your web server) and it'll automatically minify your HTML, JavaScript and CSS. You'll probably do just fine with the free tier on there.

[LDN]

Nice site. You should consider looking at BigCommerce or Shopify.

My BigCommerce site is lightning fast VS the older shop I ran, also using Wordpress.

I still use Wordpress for non ecommerce stuff though.

[anonymous-user]

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[Matt141980]

Thanks for all the pointers, I won’t pretend to understand all of what’s been pointed out but I’ve got a good idea what it all generally means.
We are going to go back to the web designers that built the site last year for us year and pass your comments on.
We are currently on a shared server so are also going to look at moving to our own. Has anyone got a rough idea what sort of cost we would be looking at for this? I will obviously ask the same question via our designers.

[Akiraprise]

I'd change your host

We use WPEngine which is on the pricey side but does wanders with security / speed of sites - it will help but also your issue maybe with excessive / badly set up plugins.

If you'd like me to take a look let me know - I've built / run Wordpress sites for the past 10 years