GTmetrix - speeding up website loading

Been using GTmetrix to analyse and fix my website (thanks @Hypnoman) and it’s pretty good, but not perfect!

There are two issues outstanding, see attachment.

Firstly… is there a way (within Blocs) to “reduce requests”? The page shows 25 ‘errors’.

Secondi… I’ve got many “expires headers” on my .htaccess text file, but how do I add the one remaining one, for the Lobster font?

Thanks in anticipation!

Don’t worry about YSlow. Gtmetrix themselves only score 90%. There is not a lot you can do with the Lobster font other than hosting it yourself. Then it will not affect your score much anyway.

As for the HTTP requests, again there are some that you just can not evade due to google tags etc.

You have a good enough score for now.

Okay, thanks!

Just went through your site Ian, love the design.

The number of requests is determined by the number of elements you have on your page:

  • Images
  • CSS-files
  • Javascript-files

I did notice you seem to load quite some images on your front page. If loading speed is really that important to you, you could reduce the number of images. This will then reduce the page size and number of requests necessary to load your page.

To see the impact, you could use the “Waterfall” tab in the GTMetrix results. There, you can filter on images. This shows that 85 out of your 98 requests are in fact images. This also accounts for 2.6 out of the 2.8 MB of the entire page size. Congrats on optimizing the images present on the page that good though, I’ve seen a lot worse (similar size, 2.5 MB, for just one image file for example).

So basically, if you’re looking for a quick win to reduce page size and requests, you could reduce the number of images.

Hope it helps.

Thanks @brechtryckaert for your input and kind words about my website.

(I’ve only recently discovered the online tools available for optimising images, so I’ve spent way too much time doing it manually in Pixelmator!)

The site is designed in the way it is as I don’t want all the information to be visible straight away, there would be too much of it, and I’m trying to keep a clean and uncluttered home page…

Users can choose what extra information they want to see, if any, and can do so without loading a new page.

That’s the rationale… I’ve tried lazy loading but it’s unsuitable for my style of website.

I totally get what you said about the number of requests - the reason for it hadn’t occurred to me, but I guess it’s unavoidable.

So I’ll cease the request for 100% loading speed results, and settle for what I’ve got… thanks again for explaining it so clearly!

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Always happy to help, Ian. You’re most welcome.