SLOW WEBSITE > Received an F from Pingdom

[CWR]

my website needing help:
cwrmusic.com

Pingdom gave my site an F when and recommended gzip – yet the Hummingbird plug-in said this, “GZip compression is already running smoothly on your site. Your hosting has automatically pre-configured GZip compression for you and no further actions are required”

All I can say is “help!”
And thank you in advance for suggestions!

LISTED BELOW IS MY SCORE BY PINGDOM ======

Improve page performance

Improve page performance
GRADE SUGGESTION
(GRADE FOLLOWED BY SCORE)

F / 45 Compress components with gzip
Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.

F / 48 Make fewer HTTP requests
Decreasing the number of components on a page reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, resulting in faster page loads. Some ways to reduce the number of components include: combine files, combine multiple scripts into one script, combine multiple CSS files into one style sheet, and use CSS Sprites and image maps.

C / 78 Add Expires headers
Web pages are becoming increasingly complex with more scripts, style sheets, images, and Flash on them. A first-time visit to a page may require several HTTP requests to load all the components. By using Expires headers these components become cacheable, which avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often associated with images, but they can and should be used on all page components including scripts, style sheets, and Flash.

C / 80 Avoid URL redirects
URL redirects are made using HTTP status codes 301 and 302. They tell the browser to go to another location. Inserting a redirect between the user and the final HTML document delays everything on the page since nothing on the page can be rendered and no components can be downloaded until the HTML document arrives.

B90 Reduce DNS lookups

A100 Avoid empty src or href

A100 Put JavaScript at bottom

[habilis]

SLOW WEBSITE > Received an F from Pingdom

The site isn’t slow, and it receives an overall “B” from Pingdom and 99/100 from Google Lighthouse. It seems that the Pingdom test isn’t well maintained and has fallen behind in supporting recent Web technologies, so I’d treat any results with skepticism.

In particular, Pingdom does not recognize Brotli compressed files, so it gives an “F” to sites (like yours) that use Brotli compression (an 6 year old internet standard). More details at: https://www.azinity.com/pingdom-speed-test-and-gzip/

Similarly, the “F” for too many HTTP requests is now mostly irrelevant because of HTTP/2, which multiplexes HTTP requests.

I’d recommend using Google’s Lighthouse, because it is more up-to-date with web standards.

[CWR]

@habilis – thank you so much. I will try Google’s Lighthouse as you recommended.
Thanks for helping me wade through the tech talk of the ratings.

I know your answer is going to help many people, not just myself.

Have a great day!