Sella – Speed Test

ROUND 1


OK – so first went through and compressed the images (we were getting some "huge network load" warnings in the HIGH warning area at first)

I also implemented LAZY LOADING on the external images – so that they are not loading til the user scrolls down to that screen – saving us that time on initial load.

Lazy Loading

SO no initial load – not ALL SITE images are being loaded at first.

Image Compression

This is an example of 1 image and how much it could be compressed –

Initial – 760 K

155K after running through optimizer

WEBP image – 102K

If we can have the server set up to sever webp images I think that would help this site out the most – they allow us to make the smallest K size images possible – need to chat with the host –

But even if it doesn’t I think the optimized versions are small enough.

Clean up Style Sheets

Once that was done I started going through the style sheets – and trying to get rid of duplicate or un-used code. (Since we started with a template – there are some calls / functions / css that we just will never use in there – that can be /has been removed). I need to do another pass – but feel that I caught about 75% of the stuff we don't need.

the biggest one was probably the fact that we can remove the entire backend css sheet that NATS sets up – To get everything laying out correctly – I effectively have completely taken it over – and there is no need to have them both.

<!--link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="nats_builder.css?skinid={$_skinid}" /-->

once those were removed or merged together etc. I started to look at how to stop render blocking.

Render blocking

1-gtmetrix-render-blocking

Critical CSS

So first thing was to get up some critical css – so that the landing page (above the fold) could render without having to load anyting extra.

Delay loading of actual css til page is complete

and set the current css / js to load AFTER page is loaded. Effectively eliminating the biggest render blocking issues.

Cache Headers / CDN

that did solve those issues – but our score didn't increase much- althought I do think that site feels quicker (I don't LOVE gtmetrix – I feel like they put too much weight on cacheing)

But we are out of the HIGH WARNING LEVEL –

2-cache-policy-blocking

Cacheing

I have settings for Apache/Apache2 for the .htaccess file for cacheing – and some steps to enable webp images. But since this is the NATS server – I imagine we have to go through performa (or whoever the host is) / NATS to get anything done with that.

CDN Setup

You guys must be using a cdn somewhere? If you can get me access – or I'll just dump over the images to you – to stick up on the cdn – and then relink them up on the site – That should help the load time as well.

If you don't have a cdn that you can use – I have a couple I have used before – if you want to talk about it –

Final Thoughts

So will run throught the css etc. and remove more of it – other than that – I can't do much more without some intervention from the host / access to the entire box –

Server Specs

Can we find out how much Ram / What is the connection like / Upload Speed – really any / all basic info about this host – I wonder if the fact that we are tyring to host a frontend on NATS – something they don’t do – could make issues down the road. I realized I know NOTHING about what this server can do.

WebPageTest

I always like their reporting better – although they just changed their site – just ran this – but will look at it today and see what else might be in our way –

webpagetestdec22-2022