craigf136 Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 I've been unhappy for a while with the initial load time for the main landing page for the our site and I was getting frustrated. We are running on a VPS with 5GB Ram, shared 24 processor, running NGINX, Pagespeed, memcached, and utilising CDN (Cloudfare). I was baffled as to what would be causing page loads times in excess of 5/6 seconds, to the point I was losing faith in ever being able to get the page load time down to a more respectable load time. So today I decided, enough was enough and I disabled all sidebars, adverts, I didn't deactivate them (adverts yes) or uninstall them but simply removed them from the main page.I allowed a few hours to pass and new relic started to report good results with reductions in response times. So I decided to do a little test with GTMetrix. As you can see from the above, pagespeed score of 99%, YSlow of 90%, page load of 2.4seconds and page size of 729KB (working on reducing that further) with 32 requests. So i decided to enable the adverts on the main forum index for the header and foot, check out the results below. Everything took a hit, more surprising was page load time and page size, 5.8seconds to load, 1.03MB in size and 54 requests. So I disable adverts again. This time, page load was 1.8seconds, with page speed being the same as the first test with no ads and YSlow being higher, so to give it a fair go I enabled adverts again. I don't know if it's all relating to adverts or if something within IPS forum software for the adverts is causing longer page loads, larger page size, more requests and a poorer YSlow, however, I have seen a few topics since IPS4 was launched about slow speeds and this could potentially be the issue (adverts being enabled) - as I have disabled them and see a marked improvement but I can't do without the adverts as they are revenue generating. I'm prepared to take a hit for a day or two but I would like to ask the community, is this relating purely to google ads or is it because adverts are enabled? If so, I would raise a ticket about it but thought I would ask about others experience first.
David.. Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 Google Ads actually do slow down the websites loading time BUT, GTMeteix calculates until the page has fully loaded. So, usually, all your content loads then the Google ads start processing and start displaying images etc which extends the load time.
opentype Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 Unless the ads block the start of the page rendering, they are not a problem. I checked your site with Webpagetest. I’m getting very poor results regarding First Byte Time. That’s also clearly unrelated to ads. I comes from how long the server takes to get all the data needed for the page. It’s impossible to tell though where the problem is, but that’s something worth exploring. Might be caused by one the blocks you use, or the sheer number of them, or the caching of them (what’s your setting for sidebar block caching?). Again, the “page completely loaded” value isn’t that important. If users see your page already and then a few missing images and ad spots get filled in afterwards, that’s not a problem. Another thing you might think about is the sheer number of resources (especially images) you load. There are A LOT of them on your forum index. For example, I personally see the last poster column as rather useless information one could hide/delete. Just as an example.
Mahumba Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 Are you running google ads? If you are, here is the way to fix that. If you are not running google ads try turning it off and see how it works. https://community.invisionpower.com/4docs/site-features/ajax-pagination-with-google-adsense-r129/ I had the same issue and thanks goes to the support staff here! Roger
xper Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 5 minutes ago, Mahumba said: Are you running google ads? If you are, here is the way to fix that. If you are not running google ads try turning it off and see how it works. https://community.invisionpower.com/4docs/site-features/ajax-pagination-with-google-adsense-r129/ I had the same issue and thanks goes to the support staff here! Roger Page doesn't exist :-(
Mopar1973Man Posted March 12, 2016 Posted March 12, 2016 To the owner of the site. It's a beautiful theme and site. But... I think you have to way in all the resource you trying to display. I'm also running Google Ads but about 3 seconds faster. I'm way lighter graphics wise. https://gtmetrix.com/compare/wnhO1Ffo/LoqykcJ7
craigf136 Posted March 12, 2016 Author Posted March 12, 2016 6 hours ago, opentype said: Unless the ads block the start of the page rendering, they are not a problem. I checked your site with Webpagetest. I’m getting very poor results regarding First Byte Time. That’s also clearly unrelated to ads. I comes from how long the server takes to get all the data needed for the page. It’s impossible to tell though where the problem is, but that’s something worth exploring. Might be caused by one the blocks you use, or the sheer number of them, or the caching of them (what’s your setting for sidebar block caching?). Again, the “page completely loaded” value isn’t that important. If users see your page already and then a few missing images and ad spots get filled in afterwards, that’s not a problem. Another thing you might think about is the sheer number of resources (especially images) you load. There are A LOT of them on your forum index. For example, I personally see the last poster column as rather useless information one could hide/delete. Just as an example. I'm actually looking into it as a standard normal non IPS page loads in 0.3 seconds. Host isn't seeing anything but newrelic is reporting some issues specifically with first byte but they say that is software related (IPS) rather than hardware. Im still investigating what I can but far from an expert here. 11 minutes ago, Mopar1973Man said: To the owner of the site. It's a beautiful theme and site. But... I think you have to way in all the resource you trying to display. I'm also running Google Ads but about 3 seconds faster. I'm way lighter graphics wise. https://gtmetrix.com/compare/wnhO1Ffo/LoqykcJ7 With the sidebars removed and just running stalk a difference of roughly .5 seconds existed, which I think is negligible. Thanks for the comments on the theme, we are aware that images are adding to page size but I'm more interested in the appearance achieved with the site than the actual size (although I do want to reduce it further). The blocks / sidebars I'm happy with, they are all used daily and something the users want. I'll let you know @opentype what I find. 1 hour ago, Mahumba said: Are you running google ads? If you are, here is the way to fix that. If you are not running google ads try turning it off and see how it works. https://community.invisionpower.com/4docs/site-features/ajax-pagination-with-google-adsense-r129/ I had the same issue and thanks goes to the support staff here! Roger Yes, that's what this topic is all about. Thanks for the link I'll have a look at that.
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