My site is http://www.ColoradoProcessServers.net using Wordpress and Hostgator.

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/coloradopro … t/yp3BiAWH

says:

http://coloradoprocessservers.net/wp-co … /style.css has 2 very inefficient rules, 2 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 26 total rules.

Very inefficient rules (good to fix on any page):

#wrapper table #header #information h2 Tag key with 4 descendant selectors
#wrapper table #header #information h4 Tag key with 4 descendant selectors

Inefficient rules (good to fix on interactive pages):

#wrapper #footer p a Tag key with 3 descendant selectors
#navcontainer ul li Tag key with 2 descendant selectors

I haven't the first clue what all that means and how to fix it. I'm just not familiar enough yet, with CSS and tables and all that. I'm pretty basic with code.

I don't know what they mean either, but it gave my site a 'F' rating, but I'm not worried

Mine started out a "C" and I've been tweaking the things I could understand or learn about, but this is one of the last ones that I don't understand.

Ok, from what I'm able to gather... I have this as a line in my style.css:

#wrapper table #header #information h2{font-size:18px;vertical-align:top;top:0px;padding-top:0;font-style:italic;font-weight:bold;font-family:arial;}

It apparently creates a distinct style, padding etc for
the wrapper table - header - information

and they're saying that this is an inefficient way of specifying that, because when the browsers read it all, they have to parse it somehow, which slows things down.

But I don't even have much of an idea what's happening here, yet alone how to improve it.

I found this: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed … ering.html

Does this make sense to any of you?

I'm not either,
These speed sites give a false hope. They aren't going to tell you how many people will visit.

Melissa,
What it means is that you probably have too many selectors sharing the same rules. E.g.

This is the rules for the h2 tag inside the div information - inside the div header - inside a table - inside the div wrapper The inefficency lies in that the css parser on the server has to wade through all these page elements to find out how to display the h2 tag. If you have h2 tags elsewhere, say just inside the table, that have to be displayed differently, you just write table h2 {....}. But if those h2 tags are the only ones in the whole site, if you never use them outside the infomation div, it's enough to write

In this rule:

the wrapper itself is being styled, but in all other cases you can at least remove the '#wrapper' from the rules, as nothing is going to be placed outside the wrapper anyway. Then you'll have to check what else you can remove.

Thanks Inger!

I just removed #wrapper table from the beginning of the h2 and h4 lines and the score on that section went from B89 to A98 , with no apparent negative effect on the site pages!

Yeah!

Now it appears to be saying that I can remove the #header from the
#header #information h2... and h4 lines too, and fix all of it.

Good that you were able to improve it!

You can safely remove the #wrapper from these lines too:

exactly but they do get to vacuum up a tone of info from their clients

Because ID's are unique, there should only be one element on the page called #information, so you can just use

#information h2
#information h4

#information will always be contained within the #header which will always be contained within the table of the #wrapper, making everything before #information redundant.



Here it's saying you can just use "#footer p a" or maybe just "#footer a" and just "#navcontainer li" because the "ul" is redundant.