How To Optimize The Speed Of Your Landing Pages

Haha so you probably thought this was going to be some long step by step guide on how to optimize a LP but its not. Instead, I found this program in the OGads chat that was posted by one of their top 10 earners. Pretty much you just put in your LP url and it tells you what you could optimize to make it run smoother. Just thought I would share it with the community! Hope it helps :wink:

https://gtmetrix.com/

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Here’s another one - https://tools.pingdom.com/

And this one - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/

The results are slightly different so I find it useful to have a few tools to tell me what the deal is.

Ya there are a lot that people don’t know about that can help a lot. Thanks for the post :slight_smile:

This is a very lengthy breakdown. Avoid reading unless you have a lot of coffee nearby.

TL;DR:
To make a website fast you need:

  • Good hosting
  • Least amount possible of scripts
  • well written CSS
  • Caching
  • CDN

The long-winded explanation follows below:
If you were to examine why a website is slow, there’s obviously the elephant in the room that we need to take care of first. Crappy hosting. Make sure that’s not the cause of your decreased speed before moving on to anything else.

Now, to dig a little deeper…there are three main reasons why a webpage is slow.


1- Too many script files

Each script file is like a mini program that your visitors need to download and process in order for your page to display.

Each of those script files needs to be parsed and processed. It takes time to process them.

Script files “hog” the browser. This means that they demand the browser’s full attention by default – unless they are marked as asynchronous.

“asynchronising” scripts is a fancy way of saying that you instruct browsers to load other elements on the page while they process the script file

So, what should you do about scripts?

The best practice is to use the least amount of scripts possible. Be aware of how many scripts the plugins / themes you use require. Not all code is created equally and sometimes you should just avoid bloated crap.

Once you’ve cut down on unnecessary script files, you should then proceed to combining what ever script files you ended up with.

This sounds fancy, I know, but it’s really nothing more than merging the contents of the separate script files into fewer file.

After doing that, you need to make sure you either “async” the script file(s) that you end up with or make sure it loads after your content – near the bottom of the page


2- Too many CSS files.

CSS files are just files that contain information that tell the browser what to do with the content on the page. Things like how big the text should be or what color the header should be.

Treat them in the same way that you would treat script files I mentioned above.

Reduce any bloated stuff you don’t need, then optimize and combine what you have left at the end.

Much in the same way that script files “hog” the browser, CSS files also require full attention until they are fully downloaded

The difference is that you can’t “async” CSS files – you can put them at the bottom of the load order – near the footer – but that opens another can of worms.


3- Too many requests.

This is an exaggerated analogy, but it drives the point home.

Imagine this,

You have a grand party and you want to order 100 pizzas, so you call the pizza shop. Now one of two things can happen.

A- you call / order pizza #1 / hang up / call again / order pizza #2 / hang up / call again / order pizza #3 / hang up / ……etc until you get to pizza #100

Or

B- you call / order 100 pizzas / hang up / done.

You can obviously tell that the later is a lot less trouble / much faster.

If a page has 99 separate requests. Each request is an item (can be a script file / or a css file / or an image / or a font file) it will take longer to load.

The goal is to reduce the number of calls (or http requests) – More like method B

Reducing / combining your script files as I mentioned above will help cut down your requests. I should also note that you need to keep the number of fonts to the minimum. You don’t really need more than 1 – 2 fonts. Images can be combine using CSS sprites

After you do all of the above, you need to get familiar with caching


4- (Bonus) Serving cached pages.

When a user visits your a page on your website, your server has to “construct” it from all the different sections of your database / php files and that takes time.

meet Caching!

Caching is like a xerox machine. if you have a xerox machine, you can just make a copy of the document and serve it almost instantly.

Serving dynamic content without caching is literally like typing the whole document all over again – even if you already have the content memorized – every time it’s requested – it takes more time.


CloudFlare

CloudFlare is a great service and I highly recommend it.

If you set it up correctly, your traffic goes through the CloudFlare network and your pages – which are cached by CloudFlare – are delivered to your users faster.

CloudFlare Cache works this way:

it only stores a cached copy of your content if it’s only been accessed from that CND Data Center before.

This means the same content from same Data Center location, anything else gets loaded directly from your server – and then it’s cached after that.

Even if you use cloudFlare, you still need a server-level cache solution.


Good Luck!

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Useful post after useful post, you’re on a roll @lll , nicely done !

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Thanks @Johnny - this is really microscopic compared to the wealth of information you guys have been sharing here :heart:

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These are the best tactics so keep on sharing them :slight_smile:

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This is how I know it’s BrandonBerners alter ego…

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Let me just put it this way…:grin:

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Ha, tell me about it. I average about 4 hours a day tops, and I don’t even have kids. Once every six weeks I just shutdown and sleep like a baby, and I am extremely productive/alert/coherent for about a week, then back to most of what you all see around the forum.

Although I jar the system from time to time with this:

http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/black/morning-thunder

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rejuvenates without the jitters associated with coffee

Aka when your skin begins to crawl after cup number 7 :sob:

Thanks for sharing this!

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When I hit a point where coffee does nothing, I will drink this for a week or two, nice low caffeine alertness. Then when I go back to the 'ol cup-o-joe, it works as it should. Try it, see if you like it. Thanks for sharing killer content your first 24 hours in!

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Here is another tool that can make your LP faster, following those tips will also increase your SEO rank:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/