Hi Bigbird230 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Optimized images can help loading speed, but there are many factors involved so it helps to give us an idea of the environment that could be involved. For example, a WP site with out-dated plugins or older php versions or too many resources involved in displaying a page might also cause problems.

Also bear in mind that not all hosts are created equal. Check other sites hosted on same and see how they perform.

For example, a WP site with out-dated plugins

First check that you are not viewing the site still logged in as admin because that will include a truck load of stuff that doesn't load for the average user.

Also, I don't think that outdated plugins will be the cause. However too many plugins will be for sure.

Recently I was asked to look into an associate's WP site because it was horribly slow. They had every known solution running for enhancing page speed and caching... Litespeed, WP Rocket and other caching wonders. The client insisted on keeping WP Rocket but they have to clear cache every time they add or update a product in their shopping cart.

Why not let the ISP, the server and web browsers do that job?

I used a WP example, but we still don't know that this involves a WP site yet. I used that example as there are so many WP situations that can cause slow loading. As Kendo mentioned, being logged in as Admin adds more extraneous resources.

You've asked a mouthful, there are thousands of articles on this topic! LOL It would be hard to even begin to give a quick and easy answer.

Do you have access to Apache configuration? If so, are you using mod_deflate? That will have a huge impact. I use mod_pagespeed, too, but it's harder to configure and can break things.

You can use Google Chrome's Developer Tools (just press F12 on your keyboard) to narrow down where the bottlenecks are. The problem I've seen the most is that someone uploads high res photos taken with their phone without reducing their size; eg, the original picture is 3024x4032 and 300dpi (2.5MB) but then they use HTML to show it at 200x267 and 72dpi (6.39kb). Which means that the user is downloading 2.5M to see the same thing they could have seen had they downloaded 6.39kb.

First thing to do is remove Google Analytics and any plugins for SEO that may be injecting it on the fly.

Remove that and see how much faster your pages load.

I can remember making websites for dial up users.

Image optimisation was vital, these days I think some think broadband will just cope so they don't have to.

@Mark_A, my sites focus on local users, and many of them are in rural areas and STILL have dial-up!

And a lot of the ones that have DSL have a virus(es)? that make them run at dial-up speeds, anyway. Those are the ones that I think a lot of developers forget about: the wide majority of internet users that barely know how to turn on their device, and they spend half of their time on Fakebook, happily clicking on viruses. Those people are still potential customers, though.

First thing to do is remove Google Analytics

I second this. I recently installed Cloudflare, and the free account has very basic analytics. That's good enough for my purposes, though, so I removed Analytics and noted a page load increase of about 500ms! Not huge, but still significant.

I think we've lost the OP, but I wish I knew the website he was talking about! LOL We could probably look at it and tell him the problem in a few seconds :-P

True, but it would need to have been posted in the Review my Site [webmasterworld.com] forum in the Supporters subforum for that kind of help.

@csdude55

@Mark_A, my sites focus on local users, and many of them are in rural areas and STILL have dial-up!

For some reason I thought no one was on dial up anymore :/

But that wouldn't make any sense.

Try lazy loading the images. Then it doesnt matter how many images you've got, the browser will only load whats visible on the screen

many of them are in rural areas and STILL have dial-up!

... and if they didn't have dialup they would have satellite, which is not much better.

And it never hurts to keep your images as small (in bytesize) as possible.

For some reason I thought no one was on dial up anymore :/

While I am in a major population area with fiber optic and up to 1gbps "average", just 50 miles out from that area the "rural" areas are still running ADSL since the copper IS installed and fiber has not yet come to the area. It's all about the money.

Thus, I assume that my site should load suitably fast for a 6mbps-25mbps and try to code it that way.

For some reason I thought no one was on dial up anymore :/

I've been reading reports on this for years (decades, maybe), and they're always a tad misleading. There's always a lot of reference to broadband availability, but that doesn't necessarily translate into usage.

In a lot of rural areas, especially mountainous areas, broadband simply doesn't exist because it's too expensive for the phone company to run the lines. To get to my house, for example, you turn off of a minor highway onto a side road, then after a mile you turn onto another side road. That final side road, though, has 4 houses! So while DSL is available on that secondary road, they've never extended it the additional mile to my tertiary road. Instead, I use mobile internet.

Similarly, there's no cable TV option for the same reason; our options are streaming, satellite, or over-the-air.

Two of my elderly neighbors have dial up and satellites, because they simply don't use it enough to care. I don't know what the third neighbor uses; probably just their phones.

My parents only got DSL because I paid for it and bought them a Roku. But my sister and her POS husband still use dial-up on a Windows 98 PC that I gave them, and that's only so their kids can do homework.

This is all in the US, by the way... it could be different in GB.

I assume that my site should load suitably fast for a 6mbps-25mbps and try to code it that way.

Until this year, I was using Nomad internet and the BEST I got was 3M! More often than not, though, it was closer to 1M.

I used to offer in-house virus removal as a service (more of a hobby, really), and saw a LOT of people with numerous viruses that had them at dial-up speed, even though they were paying for DSL! Knowing that, I still code like it's 1999 (haha) with minimal pictures and code.

This won't apply to images and I'm assuming won't apply to shared hosting either but the single biggest improvement I have seen is enabling OPcache and configuring it for optimal performance.