Important Factors to Consider Optimizing Website Performance

Important Factors to Consider

These are some of the factors that we should have in mind when analyzing the site loading speed and a few recommendations to improve the scores if needed:

• There will always be a relationship between the size and number of images on a page and the speed in which that page will load.  This can be seen in the example above, our all-in-one demo site uses a homepage slider, having several HD images that are rotating instead of just one, like the yellow pages demo to the right will impact the site loading speed. Try to always keep images within the recommended sizes.
• The more features and functionality is present, the longer the page will take to load.  Going back to the example above, our all-in-one demo site has more homepage streaming widgets on the homepage than our yellow pages demo site, this will also impact the speed at which this page loads.
• Try adding and removing features or streaming widgets to find the right balance between page load times and the content on the page that fits the needs of the website.
• Check with support to see if the website is using PHP 7 or 5.4.  Moving to PHP 7 will help with speed. This is a very seamless transition, if the site's custom widgets are compatible we recommend upgrading to the latest version of PHP.
• If the site is already using PHP 7, there is one more option to optimize the site speed, which is PHP-FPM. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is a web tool used to speed up the performance of a website. It is much faster than traditional CGI-based methods and has the ability to handle tremendous loads simultaneously. This is still in a beta version, but we offer this as an option to test it out.
• We have included an advanced setting called Front-End Optimization: Enable Resource Delivery Via CDN to allow CSS / JS resources that are referenced on all pages to be served from https://www.optimizecdn.com. If set to OFF, the system will use relative paths from the domain, but if turned ON it speeds up the delivery of resources vs. the relative path of the domain name.
  To activate the setting go to Settings >> Advanced Settings: 
  

  Front-End Optimization: Enable Resource Delivery Via CDN

Here is an example of the same newly launched site with the advanced setting Front-End Optimization: Enable Resource Delivery Via CDN  turned off, on the left and turned on, on the right:

• Another advanced setting that helps you optimize the loading speed of images is the Front-End Optimization: Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) For Images.  This setting allows you to enter a URL to use a service like imagekit.io to serve images from an image CDN with automatic optimization and real-time transformation. Images that are served from a relative path will be updated to include your inputted CDN. For example, an image that is set to /images/logo.png will be served from https://ik.imagekit.io/your-account-id/images/logo.png.

Settings > Advanced Settings:
Front-End Optimization: Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) For Images

Here is an example of the same newly launched site with the advanced setting Front-End Optimization: Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) For Images turned off, on the left and turned on, on the right:

Cloudflare Helps Reduce Page Load Times

Mobile Preeloader Advanced Setting

If the advanced setting called Front-End Optimization: Mobile Preloader (front_end_optimization_mobile_preloader) is enabled, the first web page visited from a mobile device will display a brief loading message which helps improve page speed metrics. The loading message will only display one time when the first web page is visited and will not display again while browsing the website from the same device.

An example of how this works can be seen in the GIF down below: