speeding up website for mobile/tablet

[bu06nne]

I have a wordpress site that is extremely slow for mobile and tablet users...

Any tips on how I can speed it up? Has anyone used cloudflare?

I am on shared hosting plan, would switching to a dedicated server help?

Cheers,
Nick

 

[Aegean]

Hi Nick,

Is the site responsive or are the tablet/mobile versions simply loading the full site?

Have you optimised the images etc on the site? These can appear quickly on home broadband but drag on a smartphone.

If the site is getting fairly busy its likely shared hosting will slow it down, it depends on the number of allocated users and the bandwidth they're allowing you.

Just a few thoughts.

 

[Adam H]

Might be worth posting a link to your site and the current list of plugins you have installed, There is ALOT of small brute force attacks happening with wordpress at the moment so it could be a combination of not having the correct setup and your shared host struggling rather than actual page load times of your site.

If it is just a matter of slow mobile/tablet devices however you need to optimise anything and everything, images can normally be cut down considerably , javascript and css can be minified. Googles page speed checker will be a good resource.

A VPS or dedi would certainly help in terms of overall site performance and ability to use caching agents but "might" be overkill depending on your site.

Would be happy to advise if needed

 

[bu06nne]

Thanks both for your input.

The site is responsive - gets 0 traffic at the moment as i've only just had it built.

Unfortunately, I can't paste a link as I could do without the competition

What's the best method for reducing image size without losing quality?

Cheers

 

[Adam H]

Feel free to PM me if you wish, i have no interest in starting any new projects in the near future.

if you would prefer not to however, Make sure you've optimised the images the best you can with photoshop or similar, where possible using JPG rather than PNG . Then once you have done that and if you are running wordpress find a plugin called "smushit". Do a bulk smush-it from your admin panel.

The above will only do the images which have been uploaded to the uploads folders, so if you might also want to temp upload your theme images , smush it with the plugin and then download them and reupload them to your theme folder.

The reason i say upload them to your site to smush it is because the smushit website rarely works for for manual upload.

Check this out : https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

It will tell you the images which are the biggest problems for you , also it will tell you what javascript is an issue.

Obviously there is a big difference between physical page speed which google will give you and Perceived page speed though, optimising anything and everything should give you the best of both worlds.

 

[accelerator]

What's the best method for reducing image size without losing quality?

Use a graphics program like Photoshop or Fireworks, which will have a filesize optimisation function for images.

Rgds

 

[accelerator]

I am on shared hosting plan, would switching to a dedicated server help?

As long as its half decent shared hosting, it should be fine. The performance issue is more likely due to site coding and file sizes that server availability.

Rgds

 

[bu06nne]

Thanks all - will look into this.

What are your scores on google's speed test?

Mobile 59/100

Desktop - 77/100

 

[Adam H]

Its dependant on your host to a degree but your desktop isnt terrible, Most shared hosts will perform in the mid 70's for desktop un-optimised.

With the results you have there you should really look to Accomplish 80+ desktop and in the 70's for mobile which should give you a reasonable improvement. 59 is way too low.

 

[dazc]

Any tips on how I can speed it up? Has anyone used cloudflare?

I am on shared hosting plan, would switching to a dedicated server help?

I've tried cloudflare and my site was down more times in 2 weeks than it had been in the previous 2 years. This might not be 100% representative but I can only go on my own experience.

Easiest way to speed up a wordpress site is to cache the content with a plugin such as wp-supercache

You can also enable browser caching; it doesn't help the first page load but any subsequent page loads will be a lot quicker. http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/leverage-browser-caching.html

Converting jpeg images to webp on the fly will make a big difference if you can do it. Installing mod-pagespeed is one option if you go down the dedicated server or VDS route but I think it is still possible with your existing set up?

 

[mrt]

As a sysadmin I see lots of WordPress websites, it's all too easy for a WP user to introduce slowdowns with extra plugins, and some of them are hideous in terms of their CPU usage - not really the website owners' fault, but causes speed issues all the same.

My go-to first suggestion is to look at caching - the fastest WordPress can be is when you're not running lots of PHP and DB queries on every request! Like dazc, I've seen great results with the "WP Super Cache" plugin - it's generally easy to use and set up and in many cases is set-it-and-forget-it. Web servers can send you a pre-built HTML file in tens of milliseconds rather than a few thousand milliseconds for a dynamic WordPress page.

(Of course, the flip side is caching doesn't work for everybody: some plugins may not work properly if they rely on WP running dynamically on every page load. Some can be tweaked to work, some not)

 

[Adam H]

Using caching agents like W3 Total cache and WP super cache should be the last thing you implement, If you have a clean optimised site before working with caching plugins you are less likely to run into issues especially when minifying.

Not only that but you can minify JS and CSS as min files and use those, which saves the caching agent doing it for you.

They will give you much needed final hurdle but i would recommend doing everything you can before looking at any cache related procedure, especially things like Mod_deflate, head expires and any kind of plugin mentioned above.

It really depends how deep your getting into it and what your skill level is to accomplish it.

 

[mojoco]

No surprise that...

"Google May Add Mobile User Experience To Its Ranking Algorithm"

http://searchengineland.com/google-may-add-mobile-user-experience-ranking-algorithm-205382