My previous site had Google Page Insight records of : Desktop – 92/100 & Mobile – 88/100.
I have changed to your newspaper theme and suddenly, the site has become really slow and sluggish, the css takes too long to load going from page to page – you see a horrible page that isnt styled for a few seconds before it comes on with the css.
My ratings on Google Page Insights are now : Desktop – 51/100 & Mobile – 33/100
I need this to work and run fast – can you please explain what the problems are?
Google PageSpeed Insight say:
Enable compression
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS
Minify HTML
Minify JavaScript
Compression is managed on your server; and hard to believe you would have 92 with that turned off, as that is typically good for 20 points alone, unless your prior theme was all text.
Browser caching is also necessary for all high ratings on PageSpeed Insights.
If you properly set both of those up, your speed should improve by 30 points. No site will rate well with those two elements disabled. Period.
Quick help on both expiration headers for browser caching and also gzip/deflate which should be working on your server to get any decent pagespeed score.
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-make-the-site-faster/
I already have W3 Total Cache enabled, but I had to switch of minify as the front end of the site just becomes a blank white page when enabled.
I also have force gzip plugin installed in wordpress which worked great in the past for my compression.
Page Rank is saying I need to lower the size of css, but I dont really want to tinker with it.
Yes, the instructions clearly say don’t use “minify” with W3 Total Cache with this theme, so that was a good choice đ
Force gzip is not a good solution for simply having your hosting provider properly setup gzip/deflate for your hosting account. This is a normal “needed” option for all hosting. If they won’t do it, move to a better hosting company. Seriously.
You can minify the CSS pretty easily (I cover this in the PageSpeed sticky topic several times). It’s not hard to do with the main CSS file. Worth doing, frankly. Just keep backup. All it really does is remove all the extra spaces, line breaks, and un-necessary thing like ; before a } and stuff like that. But it can cut the “size” of the file by 25% or more in 5 minutes. Super easy to do once you do it.
Great! I will have a look at this today.
Thanks
