With the TTFB acceptable, we moved on to getting the completed page load time down. Out it went and we built our own WP plugin to do push the data to Ontraport only when required. With a on/off step through of each plugin we found 2 plugins by Ontraport (a CRM type service that some forms we populating) was the main culprit. We found that some Wordpress plugins were really slowing the TTFB - with all plugins off, Wordpress would save respond 1.5-2 seconds faster. We found when developing the site that DigitalOcean was fast - and even though it's located overseas, we still found it 2 seconds faster for Australian users.

The site had already been running through CloudFlare for some time but on a shared host in Sydney (which is also where most of the customers are). The site, running on PHP, was taking about 7 seconds to load. In mid-2018 we made a big push for speed on the site. Key allows for explicitly denying cookies to be set on a zone/domain cookies are a big strain on limited upload bandwidth so to be able to force these off is great - Cloudflare adds a cookie to every header… for “performance reasons”… but remember “if you’re getting a product something for free…” See more Key allows JPEG/WebP image requests based on clients ‘accept’ http headers - imgix required a ?auto=format query string on each image resource request - which can break some caches. Key allow for a custom CNAME (no more advertising in domain requests and possible SEO improvements - and easier to swap to another host down the track). There’s a few things that we like about “Key” apart from saving $6 a month on the monthly minimum spend ($4 vs $10 for imgix). So we’ve moved Washington Brown from imgix for hosting theme images, to Ke圜DN for hosting all images and static assets (Font, CSS & JS). The results for the endpoints were superfast - almost 200% faster than CloudFlare in some tests and 370% faster than imgix. Platform Update: we’ve been using the Performance Test tool provided by Ke圜DN for a long time in combination with Pingdom's similar tool and the #WebpageTest and #GoogleInsight - we decided to test out Ke圜DN for static asset hosting.

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