Slow Page Load Time

[Alfuzzy]

I was checking Google Analytics...and it says my sites average page load time is 5.5 seconds.

About 6-7 weeks ago my site was migrated from vB 4.2.5 to XF 2.1...and I believe around 5 seconds was the load time for the old vB pages. I was expecting page load times to improve (quicker) with a a nice fresh-modern install of XF...compared to old-clunky vB4.

• Anyone have any ideas why page load times are sorta slow...and migrating to XF does not seem to have helped?
• Is this data totally saying that my server is the issue (too slow)?
• Anything else I can look at to speed things up if it's not the server?

Thanks

 

[djbaxter]

First, check your site speed on other sites - the version Google is pushing currently is quirky:

PageSpeed Insights

developers.google.com

Pingdom Tools

Full Page Test Analysis

tools.pingdom.com

WebPageTest

View this on WebPageTest.org...

webpagetest.org

GTmetrix | Website Performance Testing and Monitoring

GTmetrix is a free tool to test and monitor your page's performance. Using Lighthouse, GTmetrix generates scores for your pages and offers actionable recommendations on how to optimize them.

gtmetrix.com

WebPageTest

View this on WebPageTest.org...

webpagetest.org

Free Website Speed and Performance Testing | Dotcom-Tools

Trying to improve your website performance? Dotcom-Tools has free website speed & performance testing tools for DNS, FTP, ping/ICMP, traceroute, and more!

www.dotcom-tools.com

Second, what do those sites tell you is lowing down your site?

 

[Chromaniac]

this is too complicated to answer without someone doing a proper inspection of the website. but here is something that could shave off some time of your loading time. aimed at 2.1 right now. and a bit complicated to get it done. so only do it if you know what you are doing.

Reduce FontAwesome icon font file size

DeltaHF submitted a new resource: Reduce FontAwesome icon font file size - Reduce your XenForo page load size by 350kB by only serving used icons The default XenForo 2.1 theme includes the FontAwesome Pro icon collection. The icons are downloaded with the page as three separate .woff or .woff2...

xenforo.com

 

[Alfuzzy]

First, check your site speed on other sites - the version Google is pushing currently is quirky:

Second, what do those sites tell you is lowing down your site?

Thanks DJ for all those great links. I went to 3 of them...and overall...they were reporting ever slower times than Google Analytics is reporting.

Webpagetest rates things on an A-F scale:

• First Byte time = C
• Compress images = F
• Cache Static Content = F

Thanks

 

[Alfuzzy]

this is too complicated to answer without someone doing a proper inspection of the website.

Thanks for the reply. I was hoping (in this case)...that the only 2 major parameters to have changed were:

• The migration from old vB4 to XF 2.1 (XF hopefully being faster).
• PHP version upgraded from 5.6 to 7.3 (which I understand should be faster).

Thanks

 

[Chromaniac]

if you go through the guide i posted, you would realize that xenforo 2.1 downloads two font files on every first load. this is in addition to pretty large css files. the page itself uses only a small portion of the css and font files. so basically every first page load (they are cached so no damage on second page load) has a lot of data downloaded that is just not used. so the guide tries to save around 350KB of download by reducing the size of the font file. this alone could significantly change the performance in these speed testing tools.

there are lots of threads on this topic. and i believe developers have done some changes to improve this scenario in 2.2 but from what i have read, a lot more needs to be done to download only that data that is actually used by the page being loaded.

 

[briansol]

What's your server?

I 'upgraded' from a 5 year old dedicated box with twice the specs to a vps and went from a D to an A. the new proc's are just really that much ebtter.

 

[Alfuzzy]

if you go through the guide i posted, you would realize that xenforo 2.1 downloads two font files on every first load. this is in addition to pretty large css files. the page itself uses only a small portion of the css and font files. so basically every first page load (they are cached so no damage on second page load) has a lot of data downloaded that is just not used. so the guide tries to save around 350KB of download by reducing the size of the font file. this alone could significantly change the performance in these speed testing tools.

there are lots of threads on this topic. and i believe developers have done some changes to improve this scenario in 2.2 but from what i have read, a lot more needs to be done to download only that data that is actually used by the page being loaded.

In your earlier post as soon as you said..."a bit complicated to get it done. so only do it if you know what you are doing."

As soon as I saw this statement...I figured this wasn't something I wanted to try. Lol

But I definitely appreciate the detailed explanation of everything XF loads...and how that may add up to slow loading time.

Thanks

 

[Chromaniac]

yeah. best is to look at other areas for starters. if your server specification is good enough for the price you are paying. caching solutions like redis. there are a few members here who provide xenforo optimized managed hosting solutions as well which you can look at. xenforo really flies if you have a server configuration optimized with good caching in place. you can even make it faster for guests (which is basically what google would access) by serving it static content from a cache.

 

[Alfuzzy]

What's your server?

I 'upgraded' from a 5 year old dedicated box with twice the specs to a vps and went from a D to an A. the new proc's are just really that much ebtter.

I'm definitely not a hardware expert by any means...thus not sure if these specs are good, bad, or average:

• Shared server
• CPU = Intel Xenon E3-1271 v3 @3.6GHz, 3800MHZ, 4 core, sockets: 1. I believe 8 cores total (4 real & 4 virtual).
• SSD drives
• 16 meg RAM

Thanks

 

[Alfuzzy]

if your server specification is good enough for the price you are paying. caching solutions like redis. there are a few members here who provide xenforo optimized managed hosting solutions as well which you can look at. xenforo really flies if you have a server configuration optimized with good caching in place. you can even make it faster for guests (which is basically what google would access) by serving it static content from a cache.

Thank you. Some really good stuff mentioned there to investigate!