Hello everyone!
I was recently running my website (www.christianholydays.com.au) using the Enfold wordpress theme and was receiving an average of 80 in the google page speed test. After deciding to try other wordpress themes that appeared to receive good reviews for speed, I changed over to Newspaper. I spent a couple weeks transitioning the site over to newspaper, and then received an incredible shot when I did a google page speed test:
http://grab.by/JhpM
http://grab.by/JhpO
35/100 on the mobile version, and 40/100 on the desktop version. When looking into the reason for the poor score, I discovered several issues. It appears that all of the images are being resized and instead of optimised files being delivered, full size images are being resized via css/html. This is affirmed through GT Metrix as well. GT Metrix gives 65/100 score, and states that several images are “resized in HTML or CSS from 845×475 to 178×100.”
Can someone please help me with this issue? I’ve tried to do several things to help the issue, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
I’ve currently got MAXCDN installed with additional zones, using the fastest hosting package through Siteground, purchased the ewww image compression functionality, have w3 caching plugin installed, and static/dynamic/MEM caching through my server. I’d hate to see what my score was with out any of the caching plugins! Perhaps it’d be better??
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-Richard
a) did you re-generate your thumbnails to fit this theme ? This is noted in the docs
b) did you clear all your caching/CDN reset to serve up all the new content
try those and you should see huge improvement! 🙂
Also, check out my sticky topic on optimizations I’ve been using with the TagDiv themes the past 2 years, based on stuff I’ve been doing with WordPress since 2005.
Hope that helped vs annoyed 🙂
Hey Chris!
Thanks so much for your reply. I have tried to regenerate some thumbnails, but only with moderate success. I’ve tried four different plugins, and only one works but only works partially.
Out of the 82 images I have on my website, only 59 are able to have thumbnails regenerated after several attempts with various plugins.
Even with these 59 of 82 thumbnails regenerated, page speed is showing up a bit better at 46/100 for mobile and 53/100 for desktop. A bit better than the original scores, but still very very low. I’ve also done four out of five suggestions on the page speed guide at https://forum.tagdiv.com/pagespeed-guide/
Thanks for any suggestions you or anyone else might have. Greatly appreciated!
-Richard
Check my sticky post top of the forum, too. Be sure to turn off all your caching stuff before using the regenerate thumbnails plugin. Also be sure the thumbs are turned on for the sizes you are using in the theme panel.
Hey Chris,
Thanks heaps for your support with this! I’ll most definitely do what you suggested. This might seem like a dumb question, but how to I determine which thumbs are actually being used in the theme panel?
Here are a couple screen shots of the theme panel thumbs section:
http://grab.by/JhPi
http://grab.by/JhPk
I’m not sure what the next step is to take in order to find out which thumbs I’m actually needing, and those that I don’t.
Thanks again for your help!
-Richard
Hi,
My setup is very similar to yours.. I’m also using siteground hosting, and W3 Total Cache i’ve found it to be be really good. I’m scoring 99/100 (without ads on pingdom).
– First thing to do is use some of Chris’s mods in particular remove the Emoji Support, and any other plugins that may be loading assets on your homepage (Share plugins, Contact Forms).. you need to conditionally load these assets
– Also i minified the main javascript file using http://javascript-compressor.com/
– Remove all CSS your not using (BBpress, Buddypress, Woocommerce) and minify your CSS here csscompressor.com
I hope you get this working soon, as i have had no issues with TagDiv themes
TIP: To optimize the image thumbnail sizes you need and skip generation of sizes you won’t be using, do this
a) audit the modules you are actually using, make a list, and the sizes used by those modules (theme docs shows the modules and the sizes)
b) set those as ‘on’ in the theme panel; turn others off [using the toggle switches]
c) in the WP admin/ media, set the three default sizes to the ones you use most often which are smaller than what you normally upload (small/medium/large)
d) in some theme versions, no “right size” thumb was being added for the “related posts” area below posts, and I posted somewhere here how to add that “size” to the main theme functions file inside of the /theme/includes/ folder.
e) use the “regenerate thumbnails” plugin to regen thumbs, and from now on with new posts you should have fewer thumbs made, based on the sizes you actually use on layouts.
Useful to be consistent with category, tag, author, search, archive templates to use same layout/size for better optimization and caching.
Hope that helps 🙂
Hi Gfran5,
i use siteground hosting but i have lot of problem with newspaper and response time server over 1,3 seconds…
so my page speed is 78 with desktop with supercacher…
i use also bbpress and other plug in… could you me explain how to conditionally load these assets?
Do you have not problems with Siteground and response time of the server?
Thanks
Hello Chris,
I’d like to send a huge thanks your way for the detailed info that you provided. Easy to understand, and when I followed your suggestions that dramatically improved the page speed. Thanks!
I’m now in the process of following some of the other suggestions made in reply to my post. Hope you’re all keeping well!
-Richard
Thank you to all who have responded to my post. Greatly appreciated!
I’ve looked at some of Chris’s suggestions, tried to do some, and others didn’t work quite right for me. Please forgive me if this in an inappropriate question for this thread, but does anyone have any suggestions of someone reputable I can pay to try and speed the site up? Perhaps someone with some Newspaper knowledge?
I’m a bit weary of using sites like upwork, etc. as I (as a newbie) found at after the fact that I was ripped off for a few jobs people did for me there.
Any suggestions or points of contact would be greatly appreciated! My email is Richard_Shaules@yahoo.com
Thanks!
-Richard
@rshaules i’ve just check your site on pagespeed and it seem to be good with mobile and desktop,if you want this score to be better turn off that lazyload from the theme it’s causing the “Prioritize visible content” error..
PAGESPEED RESULTS
Gtmetrix results
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.christianholydays.com.au/1M1bkA3G
