hellomcfly

Hmm. Sounds quite similar to my approach. It would be nice if Yoast could chime in on this one. I wouldn’t be suprised if the SEO tricks interfere with speed optimization tricks.

No, I never really figured it out. My site loads quite swiftly now, but I’m not sure what did the trick.

I tried a lot of things, including switching off minification in the W3 Total Cache plugin and getting rid of CloudFlare. It might have to do something with the intermingling of minification/caching and the workings of the SEO plugin. Do you use CloudFlare or any other optimization tool?

Got it! Turning off the All In One SEO-plugin seems to do the trick. Page loading time is now just 1 second – just like it used to be. I think stuff went wrong when I updated the plugin, last week.

(Judging on the plugin forum page, though, this doesn’t look like a common issue. Could there be some form of interference with W3TC or Cloudflare?)

Thanks for your help, Damon!

Yes, I do purge the cache every now and then. I’ve done that before, though. Didn’t make too much of a difference.

I just noticed that the loading time has risen again. It’s about 9 seconds now. I’ll ask my host about this. Though the jump in loading time is new, the ‘waiting for server’-part isn’t.

I just remembered I started using a child theme last week. Just switched back to the parent theme and loading time seems to have improved quite a bit: from 8-20 seconds to about 2,5 seconds. Great stuff. Any idea what could have been wrong?

The ‘waiting for server’-part still takes the most time, though: about 1,7 seconds. Seems a waste of time. Any idea what could be causing that?

Good questions. Cloudflare has minify enabled, W3TC has it disabled. W3TC does have ‘rewrite URL structure’ enabled, though.

In Cloudflare’s CDNJS-section, Modernizr, Flexie and JSON2 are on.

By the way, I just noticed this message, written in red on the top of the W3TC settings page:

It appears Page Cache URL rewriting is not working. If using apache, verify that the server configuration allows .htaccess or if using nginx verify all configuration files are included in the configuration.

I did have some problems with the .htaccess file of my WordPress-folder last week (got a 500 Internal Server Error after messing with a referrer group in W3TC and solved it by renaming that .htaccess). Maybe W3TC is behaving strangely? Should I try removing and re-installing it?

Roibn