Site’s still looking lovely but finally getting around to optimising properly for Search and really need to get the load time down.

I’ve read the instructions at: http://blueowlcreative.com/docs/fortuna/#extra2

Unfortunately Better WordPress Minify sends the site in to melt-down and suddenly loses all styling… could you tell me how I need to configure this in order for it to work properly?

Once that’s in place I’ll have a look at the other suggestions (Cloudflare, etc.)

Speak soon,

Chris

IT might not have rights to write into your directories or something of the sort, anyway you can check your server logs? Or have your admins help you with it? It is surely something small like that, I am running the plugin with pretty much default settings.

Unfortunately it didn’t make any difference. So I tried again and entered 777 instead.
This didn’t make any difference either.

Really frustrating – what else can I try? Can you help me get this configured?

Speak soon,

Chris

Really having trouble with this. I’ve spent all day working through all the suggestions that are out there and everything I’ve done seems to have made the site load slower than before(!)
Please help!

Before I began I ran a pingdom test and it came back with: Perf grade 73, 92 requests, 9.36s loadtime, and 4MB page size.

First installed Better WordPress Minify but it broke the styling. You suggested I update the permissions so I had a look on the server and you were right, ‘write’ wasn’t ticked when I looked at the Chmod on wp-content/plugins/bwp-minify/cache so I ticked ‘write’ and entered 755.

Pingdom came back 91 requests, 44.89s loadtime, and 4MB page size.
So I uninstalled bwp minify completely but unfortunately it didn’t fix the load time.

Installed WP Total Cache and implemented the
Also tried to minify within this plugin but it seemed to break site CSS as before. I read somewhere that it wasn’t advised because it puts a lot of weight on the servers, so disabled minify here as well.

Then I installed Smush.it + smushed the images in case they were causing the issue.
Made no difference – although it did bring the page size down to 2.3MB, load time was still 40+ seconds.

So I set-up Cloudflare CDN and changed the nameservers. But this hasn’t helped either.
I installed the Cloudflare plugin but this broke the site and wouldn’t allow the slider image to load so I uninstalled and removed the plugin (keeping Cloudflare active).

Next up I installed GZip Ninja…
Then I tried WP Super Minify…
These seem to have brought the page size down further and reduced the number of requests but the load time is a full 60 seconds(!!)…

Current Pingdom test comes back:
Perf grade 92, 53 requests, 60.01s loadtime, and 335.2KB page size.

Please help!? This is driving me insane… not really sure how to unravel this and get back to 9s load-time, let alone improve it.

Could you have a looK?
Speak soon,

Chris

I’ve ran all the optimisations including caching and cloudflare but can’t get minify plugin to work – it breaks the site/styling as you’ve described. Site is slow in general with both general loading of pages and operating through admin/dashboard. I believe it’s theme issue, as it’s very slow in comparison to other theme’s I am operating for other sites on exact same server, same settings.

Would love to know how to get the minify plugin working properly and see if that makes any difference.

Could it all have been down to server-side issues – made worse by my messing around with permissions??

Seems Better WordPress Minify isn’t particularly compatible.
Using WP Super Minify instead seems to be working though although there are still a lot of CSS and JS files that haven’t been combined so plenty of room for improvement.

So current configuration as follows:
- WP Super Minify
- WP Total Cache (not the minify – only for Page Cache and Browser Cache)
- Smush.it for imagery.
- Cloudflare (online only rather than installing the Plugin)
- And GZip Ninja.

Going to continue to experiment with other plugins based on the advice provided by Pingdom test results. i.e. Specifying rules per individual resource for Browser Caching and combining CSS files.

Just about figuring out which plugin combo works best I think. Sadly, don’t think Better WordPress Minify is one of them…

First off 60s is ridiculous, out of the question.
I think you were getting things confused a bit here. When Better Minify minifies the resources (first time it runs) it actually does its housekeeping and goes thru the files, combines them and minifies them, that’s when it takes more time…

Did you switch off your cache plugin before you did that? Maybe things got messed up there.
Try again by removing then switching off all your cache (plugin + browser).

Then run the Minify routine (make sure all goes well there, ask admins like advised if still having trouble), then when you make sure (checking your HTML code) all resources are minified/combined, then setup your Cache plugin to now cache all resources.

@arke1,

I am not going to argue the theme is the fastest out there, after all it offers quite a few features (1200+ icons, Parallax & Video backgrounds for VC – which you can disable by the way), quite a few custom style presets etc, provided all its features/functionalities it’s a great performer and with proper optimization it runs smoothly!
Please address some of the guidelines related to the optimization process and have in mind this is only one way of optimizing general web resources, you can try different plugins or a combination of them.

Good luck!