I have a bit of an issue wih the loading speed of my new website (www.marklukens.nl). To me the site loads way too slowly, and the Google PageSpeed Insights gives very, very poor scores. (5/100 on mobile and 7/100 on dektop).
The PageSpeed Insights gives all kinds of possible solutions to make it load faster, but I don’t have the technical know-how to fix all this. One of the recommendations is compressing my images and of course I know how to do this. However, as a photographer my website is all about the images, so I don’t want to show my work in a total crap quality. And I already reduced the size and quality quite a lot.
Other possible solutions that are given by the PageSpeed Insights are making use of browsercaching, using gzip or deflate compression (I have no idea what this even means ??), remove JavaScript and CSS in the content above the fold (again I have no idea what this means??) and make CSS smaller (how to do this??)
The same thing goes for my other website, www.indetailfotografie.nl. This one scores a bit better with 45/100 and 48/100 but of course it is still nothing to write home about… For this website, the same possible solutions are basically the same…
www.marklukens.nl is made with the Kinfolk theme, made by Michael David Design.
www.indetailfotografie.nl is made with the Paramount theme, also by Michael David Design.
I am using Rapidweaver 7 and Stacks 3. On www.marklukens.nl I use the Image Cycler stack by Maik Barz for the full page slideshow, and the Photo stack by Nick Cates design. On www.indetailfotografie.nl I use the in-theme slideshow and the Photo stack by Nick Cates Design. On this website I also use Pluskit for the “Fancy Box”…
Can you please help me make my websites load faster?
As has been discussed before, PageSpeed Insights is not the best tool to be using for testing website speed. It’s mostly intended for huge corporate websites and enterprise-level systems. Many of the suggestions are wildly impractical for the average website owner or shared hosting company implement. To score 100% you’re almost getting to the point of a blank white page and spending thousands on optimized server hardware!
YSlow is a far better tool to use for speed testing. Especially if you set the testing criteria to Blog or Small Website in the settings. The rating it gives is much more realistic - and the algorithm compares your website to similar websites that have recently been tested. So I would say YSlow is more intelligent and certainly a more accurate tool for the types of websites most people are building with RapidWeaver.
Of course, feel free to disagree with me. But in my opinion PageSpeed Insights is not a practical test for RapidWeaver generated websites and can mislead. YSlow is easier to use and a more realistic reporting tool.
Indeed, in the homepage slider there are 15 images, at 2000px wide. Those 15 images in total are 2.9MB. So on average they are about 193KB in size… Thats not too big, or is it?
I’m not sure why it would seem that a lot of the images come from the same wedding though. From the 15 current images on the homepage slider, 10 of them are from different weddings… Of course there are some close up shots in there where you really can’t see which wedding it was but still… Anyway I’m glad you made this comment because if you view the images that way, possible clients will too. And I am not that much of a novice, I’ve shot way more weddings
Im not familiar with YSlow… Tried your link but for some reason I can’t download and install it on Safari… (nothing happens when I click in the " Install YSlow" button…
Go here and enter the site’s address and let it test it, once done you’ll be able to see all the individual elements loading and you’ll see that you have 13 images that are over 300kb with some as high as 780.
In total that page is 12.7Mb of which 11.97Mb is images
Thats odd… I replaced the homepage files in the Image Cycler stack with smaller sized images… Apparently something went wrong with uploading them since the image files should be a lot smaller now…
To add to SteveB’s comments (which I completely agree with): it’s OK to have images spanning the entire width of a page, but same does not pertain to text, especially small-sized text, like on your www.marklukens.nl site. The way you present your text is very difficult to read. In my opinion, the text should be columnized or put in a container that is just 40-60% of the width of a page and possibly use bigger font-size.
