How can I Improve Loading Speed? - Parker Dubrule Lawyers

[Web3Marketing87]

Parker Dubrule Lawyers' website at parkerdubrulelawyers.com seemed to be loading quite slow this morning (>5 Seconds). I added a lazyload plugin, minified JS and CSS, and ensured that the images were optimized---all of this seemed to help and brough it down to under 2 seconds. We are looking at more reliable hosting options for our clients---ones that are inherently faster possibly without these plugins being added to the mix. Does anyone have insight on a safe, secure, and fast hosting/server option to enhance the experience from the get go? All of the websites that we build are in Worpress.

Your help is much appreciated! Thanks!

[Mobilio]

I use iClickAndHost, SiteGround as shared hosting. I also use Amazon EC2, Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr as VPS. For CDN - Amazon CloudFront and S3. Everything works perfect.

But you should diagnose your hosting issues before considering switching them. Can be something temporary - DDoS, hardware failure, network overload, etc.

[Travis_Bailey]

Hosting & DNS

It looks like the DNS response is all over the place. Sometimes it's acceptable... at ~100ms, other times not so much. A better DNS provider would be worth looking into. Amazon Route 53 or Dyn are pretty good options.

For shared hosting, I can second SiteGround. It's a solid host for lower budgets. DigitalOcean is a very solid and inexpensive VPS, but there will be less hand holding. I plan on migrating to DO in the next week or so. My current host just removed sudo privileges from their VPS accounts. I know, right!?!

Sweet, sweet PHP 7 and Redis - here I come.

Things You Can Fix Immediately

Run the site through Pagespeed Insights. Make a punch list and go from there. There's also a download link for 'optimized' resources. Usually I only take images from that. More on that later.

One of the big ones is 'Remove Render Blocking JavaScript. The quick fix is moving Web Font Loader script. and the GA script to the footer. You're halfway there, in a lot of instances.

Images
A couple of slider images are still over 200KB. If there's anything you can do to reduce that, do so. The Pagespeed Insights tool states that the home page has a couple images that could be compressed further. Even though the savings are minuscule, it adds up over requests.

Fonts

One of the better performance increases can be had with fonts. Again, move your Web Font Loader script to the footer. Consider using fewer character sets. Do you really need greek-ext, cyrillic or vietnamese character sets? If not, remove them.

Another fun one is using the preconnect tag. Here's a practical guide to web font performance from an author at CSS-Tricks. Just make sure to use fonts.gstatic, instead of fonts.typonine in the code snippet. Here's a fairly detailed reason why you want to use preconnect, from Ilya Grigorik. (Seriously, follow that guy if you're not already doing so.)

CSS, HTML & JavaScript

The site appears to have unminified CSS inlined in the head of the document. That's a lot of CSS, and it probably isn't all critical path. In order to render a page as fast as possible, you need to display visible content first. Drop your various style sheets into the critical path CSS generator.

You can input your newly generated critical path CSS into Autoptimize.  It's a very handy plugin that minifies HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It will also combine your CSS & JavaScript to reduce requests. Another handy feature includes, you guessed it, Inline Critical Path CSS.

You will likely have to remove BWP Minify, as Autoptimize handles most - if not all - of those functions. More is not better, in this instance. In fact, you should disable any caching plugin options which handle minification.

Gzip Compression & Cache Expiration

It looks like cache expiration settings aren't setup for some basic MIME types (CSS, JPEG, etc.) Consider setting up a caching plugin, such as Super Cache or Total Cache. Failing that, this is one of the better htaccess settings repos.

***Edit: One of the issues involves query strings in static resources. Here's a good resource, with a few options to handle that.

As always make these changes in a test environment. And best of luck. You'll probably be happier, with a lot of projects.

[Web3Marketing87]

Thank you for your insight!

[Web3Marketing87]

Thank you for such a detailed response!