No Grade Change on Speed test B/C

  • Before installing ZenCache I was running W3TC which was giving me a A/C grade on gtmetrix.
    After uninstalling W3TC, removing all their trash from .htaccess and all the other superfluous files they install, gtmetrix reported a B/C grade.

    After installing ZenCache, I’m still at B/C and I have verified that ZenCache is “fully operational” by logging out and checking the source code message at the bottom of the page.

    Any ideas what I may be doing wrong or is this normal? Site “feels” fast, but then again I’m on a VPS with SSD drives which is pretty fast all by itself. I also added the deflate module to .htaccess.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Have you minimized and compressed all of your js/css files?
    Have you moved all render blocking scripts to your footer?
    Have you optomized and compressed all of your images?
    Are you serving your static assets from a CDN?

    If no, you’re not going to get any better of a score.

    Run it through https://www.webpagetest.org/ and follow their suggestions to decreasing page load times.

    You may also want to take a look into the Google speed test:
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

    Evan

    Thread Starter zorbon

    (@zorbon)

    I’m getting an F on first byte , two A’s then an F on caching static content. I thought that’s what Zen Cache does?

    I’m not getting down on it, and it appears to run fast, but grade is lower than I would expect. I’m not going to run a CDN but all my images are compressed. I’ve never found a solution for first byte and moving render blocking scripts screws up the site.

    Moving render blocking scripts should not screw up the site. If it does, you’re doing something wrong or the theme was not put together properly.

    Also, if your using a third party theme you’ve downloaded or purchased 90% of the time you’ll run into this issue. These theme authors do not put speed or performance at the top of there list when creating themes. They just cram as many features in as possible regardless of performance hits.

    Most caching plugins also cache js/css and not images. I would recommend using something like Photon (jetpack) to take advantage of a free CDN or cloudflare.

    https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-improve-time-to-first-byte-page-load-speed

    https://www.rackaid.com/blog/time-to-first-byte/

    Thread Starter zorbon

    (@zorbon)

    its actually suffusion theme

    What is important to remember is the most important thing – is your site performing well/fast vs getting a better grade. All performance grading sites/tools/metrics are based on the parameters that they check for. What is missing from every single performance grading tool/site that I have ever found is that they are doing a one size fits all thing. Ie grading a static HTML site vs grading a dynamic PHP site should be 2 different tools or categories with different sets of parameters. In any case, getting a better grade vs actually increasing real performance is not really that important, unless of course you want to display some sort of metrics or badge to someone else.

    Example to make this point obvious: Formula one and Stock cars are not raced against each other. They have different regulations and requirements.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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