Please review

[allbuffs]

I've just became an admin/IT guy for the forums listed below. There's a lot of clutter that I'd like to work on make the site faster. I upgraded all of the backend things, but any feedback would be appreciated. We are mostly a news aggregator/forum. Very little content is created by users or mods. We do like to yell at each other a lot though

My latest endeavor: to get our users off of Tapatalk and make our mobile site worthy of going to. Any help in doing that would be great! The skin we have for mobile users right now is rather pathetic, imo.

I also am trying to optimize the loading of the front page using GTMetrix, but I don't know how to resize the jpgs/gifs on the front page. We have a resizer, but I don't think that works for that. It looks as if it's all just formatted with HTML using width and size attributes.

http://allbuffs.com

[ForceHSS]

Too many links on footer there is a plugin to bring them into one link that dbtech users. As some links on the 2nd tabs can't be seen by guests you need to set the permissions to member so they don't show for guests

[allbuffs]

Changed. Thanks for the feedback!

[Max Taxable]

Main Page: 4.2 megabyte pageload. Yes, megabytes. Takes forever to load.

WebPageTest

You have some heavy lifting to do, to optimize this. The video block in the sidebar kills your load time. This call:

http://www.cubuffs.com/mediaPortal/inline.swf

And it is 1.2 megabytes of your total page load. I would seriously think about losing it at least for visitors.

This image:

http://image.cdnllnwnl.xosnetwork.com/pics33/640/QE/QEGMXWLGUMHLKBX.20140306002807.png

Represents almost 1 megabyte of your pageload all by itself.

You have 184 calls... and use alot of bandwidth and CPU. Just for one page load. Imagine when it is 1000s of loads a day by spiders and bots in addition to the human traffic you get.

Here's the Detail.

The Forum itself: MUCH better on byte load but lots of work needed here too. Slow loading with alot of 302 errors and a 403 as well.

Forum WebPageTest


Overall looks: Looks okay.... But not dazzling as one might expect a four megabyte page to be. Visitors don't need the video, or all the gadgets, gizmos and doodads that are cluttering your pageload - reserve those for logged in members.

You can cut your bandwidth usage in half easily. Speed is what cuts it on the web. This site and forum desperately need optimization.

[allbuffs]

I've actually never cared for the video. I browse the interwebs with adblockers and a flashblocker. I may look for a new RSS Bot that downloads the picture and resizes it locally.

Do you think it'd be better to serve the JS on our server? I've never been a fan of requesting it on another site, but I'm a software dev, not a web developer by profession.

I can't believe how many ad networks we use?!? I want to cut that down, but that's how we run our site besides $15/year memberships.

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by allbuffs

I've actually never cared for the video. I browse the interwebs with adblockers and a flashblocker. I may look for a new RSS Bot that downloads the picture and resizes it locally.

Do you think it'd be better to serve the JS on our server? I've never been a fan of requesting it on another site, but I'm a software dev, not a web developer by profession.

I can't believe how many ad networks we use?!? I want to cut that down, but that's how we run our site besides $15/year memberships.

RE: The bolded. I recommend getting rid of all 3rd party calls possible where scripts are concerned. The "poor man's CDN" of hosting things like JS on a 3rd party doesn't help and never has. The compressed JS would load just fine locally.

With the amount of 3rd party adverts and other monetization you have though, I'd recommend finding a good CDN - Cloudflare would actually help your site, whereas it's not worth having for others which are not so heavily monetized. Make DAMN sure that every 3rd party advert call is actually bringing in revenue. If not, drop it.

But you need to start with optimizing all your images. And using .htaccess to force caching of static content. And yes, getting rid of the 1.2 mb video. Even if you hosted the video on YouTube and just embedded it on the site it would cut the load way down for it and not freeze the browser while it loads.

Monetizing a site is always going to involve 3rd party stuff, it's the nature of the beast. And there's not a whole lot you can do to improve results with it - but the 302 errors coming from them need to be addressed, with them.

I don't envy you, your task.

[allbuffs]

OK, removed the twitter feed and the video widget. I need to see how to enable those for registered users (I couldn't find one via the CMS management). I'll try and do that tomorrow.

Any more help would be appreciated.

I see odd references to 3rd party sites (p.righub.com?!). I'm hoping all of these are ad servers, of which I'm working with my other admins to only use the ones bringing in cash (which are probably yahoo, google and lijit).

--------------- Added [DATE]1394463634[/DATE] at [TIME]1394463634[/TIME] ---------------

So I was researching this and correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that some ad servers use response 302 to serve ads. Is there anything that can be done w/r/t these besides minimizing our use of 3rd party advertisers?

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by allbuffs

OK, removed the twitter feed and the video widget. I need to see how to enable those for registered users (I couldn't find one via the CMS management). I'll try and do that tomorrow.

Any more help would be appreciated.

I would create a YouTube page for the videos and upload them there, then embed them on the site with a vb:IF conditional, making them appear only when logged in. But again, if they are YT embeds they won't have anything near the 1.2 megabyte load on you so if they are embedded they are okay to leave for guest visitors too. It becomes a personal preference for you and the rest of your team at that point.

I see odd references to 3rd party sites (p.righub.com?!). I'm hoping all of these are ad servers, of which I'm working with my other admins to only use the ones bringing in cash (which are probably yahoo, google and lijit).

Yes each one should be investigated and if it's not a confirmed income producer it should be removed IMO. If you can't determine what the hell it is, same thing.

So I was researching this and correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that some ad servers use response 302 to serve ads. Is there anything that can be done w/r/t these besides minimizing our use of 3rd party advertisers?

302 is a redirect notice, not really a "error" per se. It means the URL represents a temporary condition of redirect and the advertiser should make these permanent instead of temporary. It slows down your site to have alot of these since the browser looks for a alternative URL to fetch from. Also, it is unclear to me if these 302 objects actually ever load on a page. Because if the URL can't be resolved, it won't.

I have seen many, many heavily monetized sites and the 302 notice is very rare to see on them. Especially not alot of them.

[Max Taxable]

You're still over 2 megabytes but now the requests are over 220 when they were 184.

Main CSS Page WebPageTest