Is my home page fast enough?

Hi from about to rain again York UK,

Just ran a pingdom test after removing some fat off www.davidclick.com In general is this fast enough now?

Thanks in advance,
David

Fast " enough "? Yes. It doesn’t take 10-15 seconds or anything.

But it’s far from fast. Way too many unoptimized image assets being thrown at the user. Your homepage is 3.4mb with 50 assets, where most of them are images.

Google page insights gives it a 25/100 on Desktop.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidclick.com%2F&tab=desktop

1 Like

I just tried it on Pingdom and it took 9.15s :anguished:
But it did do it via a server in Melbourne which probably didn’t help.

I think the images are the main thing to consider. When I loaded the page, they took a while to appear.
The way you can optimise your lightbox is to use thumbnails on the page rather than the 500x500 pictures. They appear on the page about 184px, so don’t need to be any bigger and you can be a bit meaner with the compression on the thumbs. Maybe experiment, see how far you can push it before it gets ugly.
In the lightbox list, put the thumbs in the <img> tags and the full size (500px) in the <a>s.
That way it only loads the lightweight thumbs on initial page load and only loads the full size on demand.
You could also crop off the black letterboxing on the full size, that’s a waste of pixels. Lightbox can handle the differing aspects, so that’s not a problem.

2 Likes

@SamA74 Thanks for giving me a strategy to trim some fat of the page speed. I followed your advice and thank you Ive got the page size alot slimmer :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Remember to always test like for like in pindom as sometimes i forget to set it to a specific place so it can be vastly different depending on your location.

Also try https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidclick.com%2F&tab=mobile as probably more important to be seen to be fast on a google tool than on pingdom.

I know this wasn’t your question and i don’t mean to be rude but i would also consider making some visual changes as i find it very hard to read the white text on light grey and the orange text on the background grey.

The repeated background on the mobile version doesn’t do anything for me.

in fact I’d probably lose the background image altogether and concentrate on making your other images stand out. Maybe even put a large stand out photo from the last wedding you did each time. Everything is fighting everything else a bit.

On pages with text consider increasing the line-height: from 1em; to 1.5em; to make it more readable.

You need a bit of padding/margin to move the title on the left and address on the right away from the very edge of the screen. maybe even just 10px

I like the look/style of your picture on the left and i’d probably follow that as a visual. Although you also need to not left align that image as it breaks the flow of the text.

On the ‘my style’ page i’d lose the generic definition of the word pics and show them the pictures you are talking about. Thats what i’d want to see as a punter, i know what the word quick means but what does the quick pictures you are taking look like??

Hope that is useful, don’t mean to be negative.

1 Like

Your right Noppy, totally agree, ive just got to get a few technical issues ironed out then I’m going to tackle the aesthetic elements if that makes sense :slight_smile:

I have checked your site with google page speed insight tool, its 57/100 on desktop and 48/100 on mobile device. The below images seriously need to be optimized:
wedding-bench-hide-kisses-optimised.jpg
pre-wedding-park-bench-optimised.jpg
pre-wedding-kyle-umbrella-optimised.jpg

Optimizing them can help you save a lot. I do use optimizilla.com to optimize my images before uploading them to production server.

2 Likes

Thank you

You are welcome bro.

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.