Suggestions to improve your site speed on GWT?

[AlexB77]

I would like to post few questions that most definitely bothers most of us here and very much would like to listen to all of the suggestions and any advise that we can all hopefully can benefit from.

Here is what I have:

1. What would you suggest to do if your average site speed is lower than 80% of the sites.
1.1 Would you recommend to use CMS
1.2 Would you suggest any special techniques such as php includes for static pages or site menus , headers and footers.
1.3 Changing your server or optimizing an old server.

2. Proper internal linking and how it can affect your page speed.
3. Optimizing Images or using colored backgrounds instead, where appropriate.
4. Javascript on the page and your thoughts about how to defer parsing of JavaScript of an external scripts.

I can go on and on and on, but would be nice to have your opinion or your questions.

[deadsea]

I wanted to report back in on the changes I made to my site.

My site:

• Doesn't have large images on most pages
  
• Uses google analytics and google adsense but no other 3rd party js calls
  
• Has 1.2 pageviews per session, as most people find what they want on the landing page
  
• Uses mod_gzip compression at the apache level
  
• Hosted in California but I am on the east coast, so all measurements I give in the results include a cross country data trip.
  

Here is what I did

• Converted the site logo and small icons to data uri.
  
• Inlined css and javascript
  
• Minimized the javascript (removed white space and reformatted some code to make it smaller)
  
• Removed a feature that was seldom used but required 30k of javascript
  

As a result:

• Most pages require only a single call to my server for the entire page including images, css, and js.
  
• Average page size (gzipped) is 40KB (even with all the images, css, and js)
  
• Pagespeed plugin gives 98/100 (some unused css on some pages, lots of junk from adsense)
  
• ySlow plugin gives 97/100 (cachability of analytics and adsense)
  
• When I use adblock and load a page: 40KB downloaded , main page loaded in 700ms, DOMContentLoaded: 850ms, onload: 900ms
  
• When I don't use adblock: 200KB downloaded, main page loaded in 700ms, DOMContentLoaded: 1.5s, onload: 2.65s
  
• Webmaster tools crawl stats reports that Googlbot is downloading more data per page from my site because so much is inline
  
• Webmaster tools site performance is only update until Oct 4th, so I can't tell what the effect is there yet.
  

Clearly the ads are really slowing my site down at this point. I may try to cut down the number of ad slots I use, but I'll move slowly as it affects revenue.

[g1smd]

Site speed stats haven't been updated since mid July on sites I look at.

Today the stats for some sites updated and are now showing data until the end of September. The text says that it was updated a week ago, but the data didn't actually appear back then.

The update also coincided with a change in the way the internal links are listed in WMT, as discussed in other threads here.

[Alex_TJ]

I'd recommend changing from GA to Piwik, which has helped one of our sites shave a couple of 100 ms off.