I took a look…
My initial thoughts… Damn! That is a big website! and I really don’t want to f it up… It’s a very good looking site and interesting too…
It appears what is slowing down your site the most is the images. About 30% of the page/post sizes is the logo which is 500kb… appearing on all your posts and pages.
After running your website at google pagespeed insights you will see a link for optimized resources for your site at the bottom. I downloaded them and the optimized logo from Google is only 10 kb. And the logo looks to be the same quality and clarity as the large size one on the site.
As you likely know bigger pages equals longer load times.
For the rest of your images, it would be good to optimize them using an image optimizer plugin such as ewww image optimizer. After that you would need to regenerate the thumbnails using regenerate thumbnails plugin for the images to display correctly. I am a bit wary in this advice though as you have many images and it will take very long.
At gtmetrix.com the site scores very low for “remove query strings from static resources”
The code I am using on my site to score 100 for this adding the code below to functions.php
function _remove_script_version( $src ){
$parts = explode( ‘?ver’, $src );
return $parts[0];
}
add_filter( ‘script_loader_src’, ‘_remove_script_version’, 15, 1 );
add_filter( ‘style_loader_src’, ‘_remove_script_version’, 15, 1 );
Your site generates a lot of requests to load… (109)
I think many of those requests are due to your site calling youtube for the thumbnails used on the videos. You should look to have the thumbnails on your website for the videos, then your site won’t have to wait for youtube to send them. I am using ARVE plugin on my site to do this, BJ Lazy Load also does this but ARVE looks better.
I highly reccommend you get a second opinion on my suggestions incase something goes wrong. How long does it take to backup such a big site?
Hope it goes well… That sandbox sounds good… If all else fail give autoptimize plugin a shot. Be advised when it works it does wonders, when it doesn’t it can cause a lot of headaches.
Good luck 🙂
