Page Speed Guide for 2023: Beginners and Advanced

Hi, I released my Page speed guide for the Newspaper theme back in 2017. This is the 2023 version for the same.

My Website: https://medicforyou.in

Current Stats:

1. Pagespeed Mobile
2. Pagespeed Desktop
3. GTMetrix
4. Pingdom

Resources used:

Plugins
1. Ad Inserter
2. Akismet
3. Contact Form 7
4. Converter for Media
5. Formidable Forms
6. Formidable Forms Pro (Paid)
7. Inline Related Posts
8. Jetpack
9. LuckyWP Table of Contents
10. RankMath (free version)
11. Regenerate Thumbnails
12. tagDIV Cloud Library
13. tagDIV Composer
14. tagDIV Mobile Theme
15. tagDIV Social Counter
16. Wordfence Security
17. WP Rocket
18. wpDiscuz

CDN– Only Cloudfare Free with tweaks and rules

Hosting– GoDaddy (sucks but will switch later)

Plugin Based Tweaks Worth Mentioning

1. Ad Inserter
Newspaper mobile does not provide extended in-article ads. This is why I switched to Ad-inserter to apply rules to mobile and desktop versions. Works like a charm.

4. Converter for Media
Free webP conversion recommended by Google. Lightweight and also converts your previously uploaded files to webP as well.

6. Formidable Forms Pro- Paid
I bought this to have a quiz and calculator. To be honest, I spent more than 30 hours but still could not learn the conditional tags and essential formatting. Regardless, this is broken on the mobile theme plugin and has a drastic speed impact on the page. Definitely not recommended.

8. Jetpack
I am still to figure out what is the role of Jetpack in SEO and speed. Anyways, I have kept it to not destroy my existing SEO.

11. Regenerate thumbnails
I would recommend regenerating all thumbnails at a time when your visitors are not active on the website. It has some memory usage and should be done in a free environment.

MOST IMPORTANT
I browsed through forums to find that TD Standard Pack is not an essential plugin if you know how to develop your theme properly using TD Composer.

I was already using pre-installed templates. So, I simply deactivated the plugin to check if any pages were broken. Since there were none, I deleted the plugin.

It has huge speed impact and I definitely recommend creating your own templates rather than relying on the easy way out. Additionally, I would recommend you start with a pre-built website, and start editing the following Cloud Templates:

14. tagDIV Mobile Theme
If you have to choose performance over quality, I’d recommend quickly installing this plugin. It is tempting to give your users a wonderful experience, but at what cost? Reduced speed only drops your visitors from search engines. Most of us are bloggers, meaning we rely on Google and Bing for our visitors (in long term). I’d recommend using it without caring for those beautiful blocks or glittering images.

16. Wordfence Security
If you are on a shared hosting like me and using Wordfence, I would suggest you enable performance tweaks.

17. WP Rocket
I used AutoOptimize and various other plugins to speedily my website. I did achieve results, but the “remove unused CSS” is beyond my scope. It requires hours of finding the CSS and deleting them. Even if you understand what I am saying, you are still bound to make mistakes.

I switched to WP Rocket a few months back. It cost me 59 USD for a year. What did I get? Here are tweaks that I was not able to achieve previously (the rest all can be achieved with free plugins):

18. WpDiscuz
The CSS files are annoying and I believe minifying CSS and loading
wpDiscuz> Settings> General Settings> Enable Use WordPress native AJAX functions and Minify JS and CSS Files to Optimize Page Loading Speed.

If you have not installed it yet, I highly recommend you don’t get lured by it. Stick to traditional Comments from WordPress itself. They won’t cost you any speed damage.

Cloudfare Optimizations
I would not go much into detail about this. But I will summarize what I have done:
1. Optimization Tab- Tick marked all options except AMP URL and Rocket Loader (only if you are using WP Rocket because it will break your search button and menu on mobile with a Newspaper theme).
2. Caching- Tickmarked all except Always Online and Development mode.
3. Rules- I have set two rules which make Cloudfare cache all contents on my website except my admin panel. You can set them using the following image, make sure you replace your website name with www or without www (and no HTTP or HTTPS) and in THE ORDER THEY ARE (ByPass at 1st, Cache everything at 2nd).
Image:
4. Scrape Shield- Tick marked all of the available features (3 in total).

Currently, my concerns revolve around the following:

I hope this guide helps you all. Please leave any feedback or queries. Best of luck fellas.

• This topic was modified 3 years by drvarun5179.
• This topic was modified 3 years by drvarun5179.

Sorry, I believe the image tag is broken. So I will just paste the link to Cloudfare Page Caching Rule: https://imgbb.com/WGRFdt1

• This reply was modified 3 years by drvarun5179.

Update: Passed SEMrush Core Web Vitals under Site Audit today: https://ibb.co/72LZnBB

Update: Please deactivate the Inline Related Posts if you are using it. Seems to be some errors in the plugin causing multiple duplicate queries.

Deactivated to fix Initial Server Response Time.