Hi Guys,

Just want to share my two cents, I am a non-coder so couldn’t do any technical stuff. When I installed Newspaper, my pagespeed score on GTMetrix was 43. I realized there was some hack in my php files, so cleaned them up bu the speed reached only around 48.

I changed host from Site5 to KnownHost with SSD drive and extra RAM. The reading did reach 75-80 with that.

Following this I installed P3 Plugin Profiler and found out that Jetpack and Yoast SEO (1.5.x.x) was eating 90% of the total plugin resources. I unisntalled Jestpack; it was useful plugin but not indispensable.

I also removed Yoast SEO. The decision was easy as I felt it didn’t improve my SEO. Yes, I said it! I know how big a name Yoast is, but it didn’t work for me. May be I didn’t use it the right way but hell I would rather not use what I don’t know how to use and the cost opportunity was too high as speed was important to me.

And her is the result:

With my earlier theme, I had Google pagespeed of over 90. Now with Newspaper it is belwo 70, with W3 Cache in place.
The major problem seems to be the CSS/HTML image scaling. AFAIK, each uploaded image has multiple size versions automatically available, so why not use them rather than HTML scaling?

Hey, did you check your wp-config.php file? I had similar isue a while back and found out a huge junk string has been added to the php file. That caused the dashboard to break down and heavy resource usage while loading