Comments on: Speed-Up WordPress: How I Optimized Site Performance on WPShout

By: Ratan Mia

Ratan Mia — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 22:55:12 +0000

I also recommend the plugin – Plugin Organizer. It lets you choose which plugins to load by page or post. This helps a ton with page speed when you don’t need most plugins for most pages.

By: Armands

Armands — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 20:01:38 +0000

I often find these metric tools a little anoying if a client/manager just looks at the score and says – we need to get higher!
They are good for getting insights on what can be improved but partly they are about chasing milliseconds (not saying milliseconds don’t count) and not always the effort is worth it and sometimes it just makes you dig in the wrong place.
For example, on Google Pagespeed Insights only one metric is about actual response time from server. If it is 3-4 seconds then no amount of other optimisations listed there will help much.
You can do all other optimisations but it still will be 3s+.
Recently had a case like this and client wanted to get a higher Pagespeed insights score. And that we did by doing some of suggestions.
But server response time was still 3 – 4 seconds (at least). Something on IIS server made it work pretty slow. And nobody wants to look at it (upgrade, optimise server, migrate to Linux)..score is higher, all is well. Although, it’s not.

So..best to use these tools with some moderation.

By: James Isles

James Isles — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:14:36 +0000

Great post thanks for the insights.

I agree with you that the Google Page Speed test is well over the top I have dozens of sites that don’t score that well but have first page listings and do have caching, minify etc. all set up. We work with a SEO company who are very anal about this test and won’t guarantee their work until a benchmark score is met. I have spent hours trying to fix the render blocking issues and basically to do it all breaks the site so it is not possible, plus as you mention scripts not on the server (Google scripts for one) also show up which are not possible to fix without a lot of work.

I do also look at the results from Pingdom and GT Metrix as these are easier to achieve a better score. I short I think the Page Speed results should be taken with a pinch of salt and you shouldn’t worry too much about getting the perfect score as long as your site loads quickly and has the basics in place.