Of 102 websites I manage this is the slowest of anything I have ever seen. There must be some type of optimization to get GTmetrix scores up. They were a 17 Ive gotten them to a whopping 52.
Ive tried every plugin and every configuration I can think of. Could really use some help with this one please
Well, mine is 90+ without a caching plugin and not fully optimized since moving from 2x to 3x.
You might look at my long-winded tutorial in the ‘best of forums’ section, as I cover many tricks for optimizing the site – from the basic htaccess stuff, various WP optimizations for wp-config.php, removing google fonts and using system font-stack, switching to local avatars, not using social ‘likes’ tracking, removing unused CSS not used (e.g., woocommerce, bbpress, if not using them); minification of main css and js manually; using a lazy load YouTube plugin to show thumb, and only load video when clicked (won’t work on featured vids outside post); limit modules used ‘per post page,’ to limit PHP calls; make sure using php 5.6 or higher with opcache ‘on’; changing default thumbnail image compression to make images as compact as possible for thumbs; etc.
It is doable. If you have gzip/deflate on, time to live extensions, opcache, and limit external loading, you should at least be 65 as baseline. Anything below that shows serious issues unrelated to theme.
And, of course, you need to test with advertising *off* … as that will generate massive amount of errors from bad cookies, missing CSS, https mis-match, etc. — Google very bad at auditing compliant ad units.
In fact, on one of our sites it was so bad, recently I switched all ads to ‘text only’ from Adsense as they were seriously loading bad content crashing the page or causing 5 second loading timeouts, or freezes half way down the page.
