Need help optimizing my forum for speed

[Adlago]

11 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

 IPS is too slow.

Which exactly is slow for you?
How do you measure your loading speed?
Keep in mind that PSI has introduced too many requirements recently and this has lowered speed results by about 15%.

IPS has a good organization in resource processing with very good performance.
But each site has its own characteristics - and you should not blame for your speed on IPS.

[Adlago]

12 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

😩

Yea even with all my ads turned off, it still takes a few seconds for the page to load. I've aiming for less than a second. Is that possible 😏 

You need to remove all html5 validation errors. See this test

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breatheheavy.com%2Fexhale%2F

 

[CoffeeCake]

23 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Is that possible 😏 

21 minutes ago, Adlago said:

Which exactly is slow for you?
How do you measure your loading speed?

It's slow in the same way this very community is slow. Multiple seconds to navigate between pages. On a 1000 Gb up/down fiber connection.

If I go to Xenforo.com, instant load, click on their community link, instant load, click on a thread, instant load, paginate to another page, instant load.

That is not the IPS experience here.

[Runar]

9 hours ago, Adlago said:

You need to remove all html5 validation errors. See this test

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breatheheavy.com%2Fexhale%2F

67 of the warnings are "The type attribute is unnecessary for JavaScript resources", and while 67 unnecessary type attributes equals 1541 extra bytes, I doubt warnings and errors like this are responsible for the slow loading speed. 46 of the errors are missing units from margin statements in the CSS, and 35 of the errors are invalid attributes.

With that being said, I've only got 10 warnings on my community and all of them are unnecessary type attributes. Again, I doubt these types of errors are responsible for slow loading speed, but it wouldn't hurt to fix them.

[Adlago]

1 minute ago, Runar said:

67 of the warnings are "The type attribute is unnecessary for JavaScript resources", and while 67 unnecessary type attributes equals 1541 extra bytes, I doubt warnings and errors like this are responsible for the slow loading speed. 46 of the errors are missing units from margin statements in the CSS, and 35 of the errors are invalid attributes.

With that being said, I've only got 10 warnings on my community and all of them are unnecessary type attributes. Again, I doubt these types of errors are responsible for slow loading speed, but it wouldn't hurt to fix them.

When a site administrator gets used to not leaving "harmless" mistakes, ie. not to compromise - then this administrator will find any resource that creates a delay. There are too many methods to overcome delays on the net.
For example - image preload, especially for mobile performance, "onload" of other images, font preload, etc.
Of course, different cross-tests should be performed each time such techniques are used. This is a necessity because sometimes an improvement is good for a desktop, but it is bad for mobile performance, and so on.
The process of loading speed analysis is time consuming enough to be underestimated. There is enough work on everything a site uses - before applying acceleration techniques.

[Runar]

9 hours ago, Paul E. said:

That's exactly my aversion to it. However, without a doubt, IPS is too slow. We're using Cloudflare now, yet even there, it's still 2-3 seconds.

Are you using a free or paid Cloudflare plan? If you're using a paid plan, I'd love to hear about your experience and if you think it's worth it.

[CoffeeCake]

3 hours ago, Runar said:

Are you using a free or paid Cloudflare plan? If you're using a paid plan, I'd love to hear about your experience and if you think it's worth it.

We are using a paid plan. I think it's worth it.

[Runar]

14 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

We are using a paid plan. I think it's worth it.

I'd love to hear more about how you've configured Cloudflare for your community, what features you use, and anything else you'd like to share!

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, Runar said:

I'd love to hear more about how you've configured Cloudflare for your community, what features you use, and anything else you'd like to share!

We are using caching, security, and firewall features. It helps us mitigate spammers quite a bit more than IPS' spam service, which I think we're just acting as a honeypot for some days. 🙂

We have been able to limit bad behaviors from ever reaching our infrastructure, and we can mitigate against DDoS attacks and the like by having everything going through their CDN. We're at the basic paid plan--using nothing particularly fancy. Caching seems to work great. There are some adjustments we had to make for certain administrative functionality, yet for the most part, the impact has been nothing but positive and we're saving quite a bit on bandwidth expenses compared to otherwise.

The security features alone make it worth it for us.

[Makoto]

14 hours ago, Runar said:

I'd love to hear more about how you've configured Cloudflare for your community, what features you use, and anything else you'd like to share!

I also recommend upgrading to Cloudflare's Pro plan personally, at least. Business has some useful things, but they usually have additional pricing associated with them and you need a good budget to be able to afford these optimizations. Pro is the perfect balance for 98% of clients I'd say.

Outside of security, here are the general settings I recommend enabling to improve performance on Cloudflare,

Essentially, basically all of them but Railgun. Lossy vs Lossless image optimization comes down to preference but I cannot tolerate lossy optimizations, but even lossless optimizations with WebP enabled can be extremely useful.

Outside of performance, it cannot be understated how much of a boon Cloudflare can be for security as well. As @Paul E. said, the security features of Cloudflare alone make it worth using. The performance boons are secondary, but potentially great as well.

On top of that, Cloudflare can even work as a good load balancer for larger communities that need it, so that's there for you if you ever need to scale to that point.

Edited September 30, 2020 by Makoto