Page Speed Test with Pingdom (Gzip Question)

010101

A post by @[deleted] looking at Flarum's speed has been making me want to tweak one of my Flarum installations to get the page load time below 1 second. With shared hosting, I've managed to do this.

🥳

Just barely... but I hit my goal. Although, I think it is largely thanks to Cloudflare. And, I don't have a ton of posts, tags, or traffic.

As you can see though my site's rating is a B because Pingdom says it isn't gzipped and that I need to "use cookie-free domains."

The use cookie-free domains part I don't care about. I'm not going to try and serve static files from a cookie-free domain like it wants. Forget that noise! 😄 Get a life Pingdom! 😉

But, I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on the gzip part. I don't understand it because my host says they use gzip and I've read Cloudflare uses gzip too. Anyone have experience with this? Is Pingdom just wrong?

MohdKhan

yes, Pingdom's Tool not detecting Gzip correctly if you're behind CF.

010101

MohdKhan Oh... Thank you!

clarkwinkelmann

The Lab will tell you if your javascript is gzipped. Maybe the tool you used also checks if images or other resources are gzipped?

I think just developer tools in general should show what was gzipped or not when browsing with the network tab opened.

Not sure what cookie free domains have to do here either. If you're a big website you might want to do that, but for small websites it probably won't make any significant difference, except making the webmaster's job more complicated.

010101

clarkwinkelmann Oh yeah, I forgot your lab does that. Sure enough, it says I’m saving 66% on asset size thanks to gzip. Cool.

tankerkiller125

According to my Browser Insights in Cloudflare the actual request time for Flarum is about 400ms, but then there is 550ms of browser processing time. So I'm not sure how pingdom or other services are measuring things, but at least for me I personally measure the request time since browser processing time can vary greatly by computer processing power.

Also an interesting metric is that Edge has on average a lower processing time than any of the other browsers.

010101

tankerkiller125 Also an interesting metric is that Edge has on average a lower processing time than any of the other browsers.

I’ve heard this as well. Strangely, I haven’t used Edge yet.

I also forgot to mention that I use the new rich text editor extension which is like loading Flarum Core twice size wise. 😬 But, maybe that doesn’t matter for these single page speed tests? 🤔 Would loading the homepage load the rich text editor?

Here’s what I’ve learned from doing these speed tests:

If you use Google Fonts, choose just one or two, and self host the fonts. Seems to have improved my speed.
Forget trying to create some kind of custom footer with added JavaScript and a whole bunch of junk. I removed code I had in my custom footer and instantly my page load time got better.
It’s not for everyone but, use Cloudflare. But, don’t turn on “Railgun.” That feature broke Flarum for me. But, you can use all of the minifying and caching features.