I have a WordPress website that I need to improve the speed performance for.

I've tried a couple of plugins that were recommended through articles found on google, but it didn't quite give me the performance I'm looking for.

What's the best way to improve performance related issues? My website is: http://thefoodhead.com

Simplest, free way: Put varnish in front of it and configure it properly, if you haven't already.

Do you have fastcgi_cache set in nginx?

Do you have APC installed for php?

What's your traffic like, how many hits? What's your budget? What's your current server (does it have SSD? What cpu, how much ram?) What's the full software stack?

My solution, dealing with million++ views sites a day, is to just throw more hardware at it after certain point (separate servers for databases, separate for app, separate for static files (eg. wp-content/uploads), separate for varnish).

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/thefoodhead.com/H0iqqr5Q

GTMetrix uses PageSpeed and YSlow to analyze your site and generate a report about what needs to be improved.

You can click through each row under PageSpeed and YSlow to get more details about what each thing is and what can be done to improve them.

The timeline tab will show you how long each resource took to load etc. For example, if you scroll down, you'll see a resource highlighted in red that's throwing a 404 error which is: http://thefoodhead.com/wp-content/themes/pluto/js/jquery.meanmenu.js. Because it's 404ing, the request hangs up for a couple seconds on it. What I would recommend doing is contacting the theme developer so they can address the problem or simply go in and create an empty file with the same name, in the same location, so it's found upon request.

It appears a good chunk of your load time is coming from your images. You should install a plugin called "Lazy load" which will load your images asynchronously (all at once instead of one after another).

Installing a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache can improve your load times quiet a bit too if it's configured right. I can give more details on this if needed.

Use a CDN such as CloudFlare (there basic plan is free). CloudFlare will cache your content on 23 of their servers around the world. When somebody makes a request to your site, images and other content will be pulled from nearest CloudFlare server to them instead of the server your hosting account is on. This helps load time and also reduces the load on the server which means more requests can be handled. CloudFlare can also do things like HTML, CSS, and JS minification.

... and the list goes on

Make sure you're using the latest (and compatible) version of PHP available on your hosting account as well. Speaking of which, what kind of hosting plan are you paying for? How many hits?

Be aware though, the things I've mentioned have the potential to cause problems. After making changes, I'd recommend clicking through your site to make sure everything is how it should be. If not, undo the last change you made etc

This post was edited by SelfTaught on Mar 17 2015 05:09pm

Thanks for the tips. It's a new website so not much traffic. I forgot to re-activate w3 total cache and activate the CDN. So I've done that.

I've tried Lazy loading the images before, but it messes up the layout and the infinite scroll.

I'm using HostGator for my hosting.

This post was edited by Ryans on Mar 18 2015 02:14pm

There is 8mb of data being downloaded, jesus christ.

Optimize your images before putting them online, they also aren't being served via a CDN. Disable db caching in w3tc, consider asking your host if they have any ideal configurations for Wordpress.

I'm using EWWW Image Optimization already. I tried to set up a CDN yesterday with Amazon cloudfront but it keeps giving me an Empty Bucket error.

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I've made a lot of speed improvements to it. Let me know what you guys think.

First Step don't use WordPress if you're looking for performance.

Your site loads fine for me, no speed issues here.

This post was edited by HighschoolTurd on Apr 3 2015 06:34pm