Website speed

Hi there,
It’s the first time we use the Newspaper theme to create a website. However, what is negatively surprising is the speed we obtain with the theme. We are still trying to improve it since we have bad results.

The website is located here: https://letzbehealthy.com and is configured for two “languages/regions” with WPML.

We followed the different recommendations given here: https://tagdiv.com/how-to-increase-page-loading-speed/ and in other topics on the forum. The only thing is that we did not set up any CDN: our target population is in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and the server is localized in France (Gravelines, OVH). Also, to start, we are on a shared server since we don’t have much traffic, but we will consider switching to a dedicated server when it will grow. The website is, however, slow while never reaching limits of the CPU usage.

Regarding the Plugins, we have:
– Advanced Ads Pro;
– Autoptimize to minify CSS;
– Contact Form 7;
– Duplicator Pro (running during the night);
– Insert Pages;
– Newsletter;
– Really Simple SSL;
– ShortPixel Image Optimizer;
– Slide Anything;
– The Events Calendar;
– Wordfence Security;
– TagDiv suite (except Mobile Theme & Standard Pack since we only use Cloud Templates);
– WP Super Cache;
– WP-Optimize to clean the database episodically;
– WPML suite, and;
– Yoast.
We, therefore, use well-known plugins that are quite standard…

The score is “OK” when looking at the desktop version (PageSpeed Google), with a score starting around 80 when the cache of the server is cleaned and slightly improves after reload. Still, the page loading speed could sincerely be enhanced.

On the mobile side, the score is horrible. We don’t use the mobile theme because our mobile display is supposed to be a simpler version of the desktop version with the same design & functions. We use lighten versions of our desktop version thanks to CSS hidden functions (which is the recommendation from TD team)…

Anyway, Lazyload is activated, images are optimized & sized correctly (normally), etc. What’s wrong?

Thank you in advance for your input

Note that we also tried disabling all plugins (except TD) and the results are quite similar. In addition, we use HTTP2 and run on PHP 7.4. compiled in 64 bits.

Hi Arnaud. It is an old problem and following all tweaks mentioned by them achieved nothing specially on mobile

Hi Arnaud,

I have also tried a lot to improve the page speed with the Newspaper theme. Unfortunately I never got beyond 60/80 mobile/desktop. Not even with the mobile theme. The only thing that finally helped me to reach a page speed of 97-100 permanently is AMP (all you need to do is to install the official AMP Plugin and activate AMP in Newspaper Theme). Even completely without optimization a speed of over 90 is possible. There are some limitations but for a “normal” news page it should work quite well. Here my page: WLAN and its AMP-Version https://wlan.net/?amp (For mobile visitors)

• This reply was modified 6 years by David.

Hi,
It’s indeed a problem, even more if you consider that TagDiv promotes the theme by announcing super fast websites (Google score of 98 on an Ad, if I remember well). Well… With which configuration then?

Regarding the AMP Plugin, I’ve indeed tried and found it quite limited. Specifically:

• We need to insert ads at specific locations. Do you know whether it is possible?
• How can we further customize the AMP version. I see for instance that you have a block of three articles on the top of your AMP website version. It is the standard way. However, the size of the thumbnails is not in line with our desktop version and we would be able to change it. So… either we play in the CSS file and risk to lose it after an update or…?

I also know that some developers provide an alternative to the official AMP plugin and they developed a theme dedicated to Newspaper: https://ampforwp.com/themes/newspaper/
Do you know about it?

Hi,

Google score 98 without AMP I think this is nearly impossible. About your questions:

Ads at specific locations on AMP shoud be possible by using the Advanceds Ads Plugin by Thomas Meyer. We use it to place the ads on our Site here: Example

Never adapted the AMP thumbnails but it should be possible by adding some custom css to the mobile theme css field within the theme settings. (We changed the whole logo and color for one of our categories even in AMP, Example)
The amout of posts displayed can be set from mobile theme settings.

Hi Loano,

Nice AMP example you have. It looks quite nice on mobile!

I assume you use Cloud Templates for your different pages, categories, and posts. Am I right? However, when using cloud templates, I faced some constraints. Specifically, using Advanced Ads and image ads (not AdSense), I wanted to create ads displayed according to Categories & Language. This was not possible with cloud templates since they are not considered as categories per se…
So the trick was to use one template per category, and assign a different ad group… Painful, but this is the only trick I found so far. Any recommendation?
In the meantime, I assume it might lead to imperceptible improvements in speed as it does not run over 20 “If’s” (conditions) to display an ad. But normally imperceptible.

I ran some tests on Demos provided by TagDiv.
Newspaper Gossip Pro obtains a score of 40/70 while the default Newspaper Pro theme has an impressive speed around 7x/96. However, still some ajax calls, and a quite buzzy page… So, are some improvements made that are not standard? Did they manually modify CSS etc?

Hi Arnaud,

Thanks for the compliment! No, I’m still on Newspaper 9.8 without any Cloud Templates. Therefore I can’t say anything about the cloud templates. Concerning Advanced Ads, I always have some queries, I e.g. exclude some single posts. But I don’t think that slows down the speed. I have tested this a while ago and found no difference.

What definitely increases the loading time huge are ads above the fold. In terms of load its always better to have them a bit below the fold and lazyloaded with Advanced Ads.