WebPageTest

iSpeedLink.com · (This post was last modified: 12-03-2013 09:05 AM by iSpeedLink.com.)

You still have the HTTP 301 Moved Permanently issue which is costing you over one second.
This redirect must be in the Word Press PHP as it has followed you (Headers Below)

I suspect someone (e.g. a plug-in) is hi-jacking each visitor then redirecting them back to you when they are done doing what ever it is they do.

Search all your PHP files for "header(" (without the quotes) and look for a header statement that starts with Location like this:
header('Location: http://steps-forward.nl/, true, 301);

or may look like

header('Location: . _SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], true, 301);

There is also a problem in your <HEAD> that is costing you an additional One Second

The page should start rendering when the last CSS file is loaded.

First off Requests #14,15,19,20 the CSS files need to be moved closer to the top of the <HEAD> right after the </TITLE>

Your Header includes the Character encoding so the <meta charset="UTF-8" /> is superfluous and is in HTML5 format with a 4.01 DocType. You have 179 HTML errors with the 4.01 DocType and only 5 inconsequential IMG ALT errors when checked with an HTML 5 DocType

But still the page does not begin to render after Request #20 CSS file.

I suspect the jet pack (Request #29) or gravatar JS (Request #30) as the page begins to render after them

Combine all the CSS files into fewer files. A single file is best. Order them in largest to smallest (byte size) sequence.

Your server is using Etag rather than max-age (best) or Expiration date caching. With Etag the Browser must make a request a request to the Server to see if the Etag hash has changed. This request takes nearly most of the page load time. On the waterfall chart the Green is Request time and the Blue is data being received. Etags only remove most of the Blue and none of the Green.

To turn on caching if it's not in your site's control panel, add this or create an .htaccess file.

This is an .htacess file from one of my very staic sites. Everything os set to cache for a year.
If you'd like to fine tune by type of file see:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/speed-...ching.html

AddCharset UTF-8 .html
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
</FilesMatch>
ExpiresDefault "access plus 31536000 seconds"
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)(\.gz)?$">
ExpiresActive On
Header set Expires "access plus 31536000 seconds"
</FilesMatch>
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

If you are not going to cache then put as much content in the index page rather than linking it in.

REDIRECT HEADER
from the old IP: 94.103.150.55

##########################
Request 1: http://steps-forward.nl/
URL: http://steps-forward.nl/
Host: steps-forward.nl
IP: 159.253.5.7
Location: Netherlands
Error/Status Code: 301
Client Port: 4715
Start Offset: 0.106 s
Initial Connection: 37 ms
Time to First Byte: 7931 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 0.3 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.3 KB

Response Headers:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 20:34:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2
X-Pingback: http://www.steps-forward.nl/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.steps-forward.nl/
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 20
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
############################

REDIRECT HEADER
from the new IP: 159.253.5.7

############################
Request 1: http://steps-forward.nl/
URL: http://steps-forward.nl/
Host: steps-forward.nl
IP: 94.103.150.55
Location: Netherlands
Error/Status Code: 301
Client Port: 3761
Start Offset: 0.115 s
Initial Connection: 38 ms
Time to First Byte: 947 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 0.4 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.3 KB

Response Headers:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 08:30:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.27
X-Pingback: http://www.steps-forward.nl/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.steps-forward.nl/
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 20
Keep-Alive: timeout=1, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
############################

One other very bad thing is the image size and the Browser scaling the images.

For example you have an image
http://www.steps-forward.nl/wp-content/u...G_4167.jpg
4,272px × 2,848px
4,468,736 bytes

Which is scaled to 170px × 170px by the Browser

Resize this image to 170 x 170 and save with 7o% compression

I did this and the result image size is 32,768 bytes, saving 4,435,968 bytes

Same goes for http://www.steps-forward.nl/wp-content/u...G_4868.jpg
4,272px × 2,848px (scaled to 170px × 170px)
5,648,990 Bytes

Check ALL the images. Generally you can use 70% -75% compression without affecting perceived quality.

If you cannot get caching turned on the convert the images to MIME code 6 at a site like:
http://www.base64-image.de/step-1.php?m=1

Code 64 increases the file size by 30% or so but the gzip compression reduces this to typically, from my experience, about 7% overhead.

Code 64 converts binary data to character based data making it email and HTTP friendly. This is how attachments are sent in email.

It looks like this with a lot more characters:

<img src="data:image/jpg;base64,/9j/4WH4RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAALAA8... ">

Or as a background image in CSS
<style type="text/css">
#img1 {
width: 170px;
height: 170px;
background-image: url('data:image/jpg;base64,/9j/4WH4RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAALAA8BAgAGAAAAkgAAABABAgAQAA=... ');
}
</style>