Looking to see if anyone is interested in making a few extra $$$ assisting us with our page speed issues/challenges with our Newsmag theme site.
Please me me know. Thank you in advance!
James
Hi,
Assuming you have seen our pages speed guide: https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-make-the-site-faster/ and you don’t get any answers here you can search for a freelancer on site’s like: http://studio.envato.com/
Thanks!
I have hired someone to work on the site’s speed. I will update this thread with how they do.
At the time of hiring them the theme’s speed on our site is registering at 23/100 and 31/100.
We will see how they do and if this was positive money spent.
James
I would have offered to help; but I charge minimum $500 for stuff, so figured you likely would not be interested — and I try not to “take jobs” from forums where I post stuff as it seems somehow crass or predatory. For whatever that’s worth. 🙂
All good.
I’ll report back how the work goes when completed hopefully in the next 24 hours.
They are still working on it, but improving quickly. Some current stats from tests:
Tested http://www.ilike2complain.com with the Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools.
This specific test was done on August 15 at 08:27:39 from Stockholm, Sweden. The web page took 3.32 s to load, used 92 requests, and weighed in at 1.4 MB.
The Google Page Speed performance grade for this web page is 78/100
On google PageSpeed Insights page the numbers are up to:
Desktop: 76/100
Mobile: 56/100
They have completed 1/2 of the work so far. This is a lot lot better then the 20/100 we had 12 hours ago.
And of course you could have done a lot of it yourself for free following my helpful optimization guide 😉
NOT everyone is comfortable making changes to code and other tweaks to the template.
True, but it’s still good to learn how the functions.php file, .htaccess, and wp-config.php files work, as those are necessary for customizing any WP theme/install — and for things like WooCommerce where to make ANY customizations those have to be done in the functions.php file, not editing templates. Still, totally understand some folks don’t want to “touch stuff” and would rather pay others to do it. That’s why I am still in business doing tech work for clients and design/branding after 32 years 😉
I mostly added that comment for folks who might follow your thread and then think they need to hire somebody to do 90% of the legwork, which can be done in 10 minutes by editing 3 files. The trickier bits of massaging caching, mod_pagespeed, etc., is worth paying for if somebody else is truly experienced at it and not being paid to “learn by doing” on your behalf.
So, all good. Lots of options for folks to DIY or hire out.
And we paid under $40 so it will be money well spent. And it will be time we did not have to take to fumble around and attempt to do it ourselves without the expertise to feel comfortable making changes like suggested in the different threads.
Good deal.
And for those who do want to DIY, my very explicit sticky topic at top of the forum, has the basic info everybody should be doing to get their baseline score to 80+ as starting point.
Not to be bringing any argument here, but I just have WP Rocket and Cloudflare running with just normal settings in them and no tweaks to the theme and I get a loading of 1.5 seconds average. I did not look or use Chris recommendations. So not all experts make it easy either. Nothing against you Chris. Sometimes experts try to get as much out of their customers and they don’t care either. So I rather know the stuff and DIY way. Not even using the speed booster plugin.
Did not want to hijack the thread, just add two cents to it.
Well “page loading time” is only one element of optimization; there is also Google’s PageSpeed which can impact ranking for mobile users and how well your site will be shown in SERPS. That is one of the main reasons to “optimize” a site — “speed loading” is one aspect while “speed rating” is another. So, obviously WP Rocket and Cloudflare help by re-writing pages for clients, but not everybody wants to pay for those services.
For example my business site has a UX score of 100/100. Desktop 97/100. Mobile 96/100. Avg. page load 1.2 sec with https and no CDN or caching plugin on top. That matters. While various solutions exist, DIY, outsource, or paid service to rewrite pages dynamically — one needs to do something.
So, obviously folks need to research what fits their needs the best.
All great info in the thread as I’m sure the newbies will find it of interest. 🙂
Also, forgot to say that images are a factor to large loading speeds too, and people ignore the fact that keeping the images around the exact same size as the others on the website would help and keep them lower than 1080p size. Most of mine are 1024 x 576. few are tiny bit bigger, but that was before I did the 1024 x 576.
Sorry, but cloudflare is free and paid. Not all paid. I did not say to use WP Rocket either, I said I used it. That means as an example use a caching plugin. I like how my words get twisted easily. The point is saving money, but you took it as paying money instead.
Not trying to be rude, but experts do not know everything and can’t fix everything when paying them either, is another point.
All good points. For us our site is pic heavy and was testing VERY SLOW. Whether that was the theme or content was irrelevant (for us). We just needed it to perform better. So hiring someone and spending $40 for them to tweak to get up to an 80/100 score level was worth it.
We are about to start a big promotion to coincide with the official launch of the site. The promo we are doing is with another site that has over 75000 social media fans and over 15000 newsletter subscribers. Before we risked pushing a huge number of those people to our site (and possibly as new subscribers) we wanted to get it running as well as possible.
More piece of mind and this was easiest and quickest solution (for us)
Again, We greatly appreciate all the knowledge here and from everyone. Just wanted some help and found it.
And now we have a good guy to go to if we need some assistance in the future.
