If you view the link above you can see what is going on with my site.
- This has been a big issue of mine. I feel like overtime my load time will get slower and slower if i do not correctly fix my problems now. As everyone, I want the website to run as smooth as possible. I've have a ton of issues with fitting everything on this wordpress site. Overtime, all of my css/js/content/html-structure has added up to a bundled unorganized mess. I want to figure out how to correctly organize my code.
- Ive added some rules to compress files/gzip within my .htaccess.
How do i correctly eliminate render blocking JS/CSS and improve my css delivery?
How do i reduce my server response time? Im assuming this would go hand-in-hand with the above question.
How should i correctly minify Js/Css?
I have tried the plugin W3 Total Cache before. It was very buggy on my site, and disrupted some of my JS which in turn made my site very slow.
You do not often see an embedded Youtube video used as a welcoming splash image. And there is a reason for that. It also disappears after a time leaving a big empty white space. The single biggest file you have is the embedded Youtube video at 1.2 MB. No matter what you do to compress your relatively small HTML and CSS, the video size will far offset it. tools.pingdom.com puts your load time at 3.53 seconds from the Dallas server which is much faster than I was able to download it.
You have CSS being output by a PHP file which is taking 1.5 seconds to return to the browser according to tools.pingdom.com and you have a second CSS file also output by PHP. 1.39 seconds for the request to the main index page HTML to be returned. That’s not bad for Wordpress, especially if you are using plugins. Wordpress is a big bloated inefficient monster of code to begin with.
I would agree with your claim that your CSS and Javascript code is a “bundled unorganized mess”. Every time a visitor visits that site, their browser must make 127 requests to servers for data. That is a huge amount of requests. I don’t know how long preloading all those images takes. You have a lot of thumbnails for menu items around 127 x 72 pixels in dimension all with file sizes over 25 kB. That file size seems a little big to me for the small size of the image.
Think about what you want to keep and what you can get rid of and go for there. For starters, that 11 second embedded Youtube welcome video might be one of the first things you can do away with.
I too found W3TC to be buggy and now I never use it. It ended up either making the website super-fast, or super-slow. CSS almost always rendered differently, and let’s not mention how JS was rendering. I ended up giving up on it!
I now use a different host and keep my WP installation up-to-date. From experience keeping WP up-to-date makes a huge difference on the speed. Use a image optimization plug-in to make your images smaller. For an off-side method I use Faststone PhotoResizer (it’s free). It resize them and makes the smaller in batches. For a mac, PNG Optimizer is good. For PC FastStone is probably the best.
I do not minify any of my code. It ended up breaking my website. I feel the hosting provider plays a bigger issue when it comes to downloading your web pages, rather than a few KB. In terms of the requests, if you write your CSS properly you won’t have this as an issue. You might also experiment with CSS Sprites.
Ironically one of my website was very slow but had an excellent page speed. I am not sure how this worked, but in the end, page speed is just an indication of what you need to look at, it’s not set in stone, as other factors (your host) can play a massive role to your website.
I have a couple of suggestions too. In addition to the efforts you’re making to clean up the code and images, I’d also check with your web host. There are some things they can do as well. You can put your site on CloudFlare for free, that’s a CDN, it helps accelerate your site. Also, check to see if your host runs a Varnish cache. Varnish is a cache that runs on the server itself, and loads files that are requested often into memory.
I’d keep doing what you’re doing, but I’d also lean on your host to see what they can do for you too.