Well, using Yoast helps to put the OG tags into the head of your HTML documents. If you “view source” for one of your post pages, and you don’t see the OG tags, then you need to use something like Yoast SEO to insert those into the head. Once you activate Yoast SEO, then view the page source for one of your posts and the OG tags should be there. Of course, make sure you enable that function in your Yoast SEO settings under social media

Always happy to help 🙂

Stop using jetpack ;-0

We use couple of plugins to automatically resize images, and also set featured image from image in post; and modify functions.php file to set default compression in WP at “60” (see my post on this many places in forum).

1) add to bottom of your functions.php file before doing regen thumbs
add_filter( 'jpeg_quality', create_function( '', 'return 60;' ) );

2) plugin to upscale images to fit theme sizes
Thumbnail Upscale

3) plugin to set featured post automatically
Auto Post Thumbnail PRO

Lucian
it occurs to me it might be easier for me to set the ‘default theme color’ which would control the sidebar widget color blocks behind the widget title text consistently, and then simply over-ride the menu color for the selected hover underline and drop downs?

If you could point me at CSS over-ride for those elements that would be awesome. 🙂

Right, but that doesn’t help with things like search box, a widget plugin such as showing RSS feed from our main site (outside of blog area), categories widget, etc., where there is no option to set color of block text or backing.

So the way it works now
1) default site-wide theme color; impacts menu and default color of sidebar widgets and comments widget areas, for the solid color behind the widget title block
2) you can change the color for featured content blocks, but then those are different from the “default” color block backing the widget title color backing

Perhaps it’s block-title span I need to over-ride?

Sorry. Usually I’m not this stupid. 🙂

(And I had uninstalled Chrome temporarily as I switched to the new 64 bit version but then some things like RoboForm not working, etc., and I need to go back to 32 bit version of Chrome until they get to v38; so can’t do the developer view hover on item find element trick…. suppose I should do that !)

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

You might be able to do that in the sitemap files for Yoast (and you’d need to buy the PRO version to get any support from them); however keep in mind without a date and last update many search engines would have no idea if you update/change content anymore (could be wrong). It also wouldn’t change the “date added” to the Google index which they keep track of, and they could also pull date from when it’s first shared in social media… which kind of means it’s not practical to hide when something was first created.

If you’re building a new client site, and doing redirects from old static pages to new fancy ones; you lose no equity for how long the site has been online with Google, etc., as they look at the site URL + content + indexed date. So, changing location via 301 just tells them where the NEW version is, and you lose none of the equity from a 10 year old page. That may not be the concern, but I’m guessing on one possible scenario there 🙂

Yes!!! I did the same thing, and I do mention this in the early posts in the PageSpeed topic; but good luck slogging through all of that 😉

You can actually specify the default language for the site in the wp-config.php file for your site which sets the de-facto default language. This may not be what you want, but the default is already English for WordPress unless it’s changed.

@mixvice

looks like one main thing for mobile you need to fix is the images
1) set the default compression in your functions.php file per my recommendations in the pagespeed topic (specify 60, since default with WP is 90)
2) regenerate thumbs once you do that to reduce all in size from core starting image you uploaded; but make sure you have backups if needed
3) make sure you use a plugin like smush.it or similar, although changing your default compression might do most of that for you
4) make sure the images you’re uploading to begin with are optimized, per my recommendations in the pagespeed topic — for example for the featured post image you would want to shoot for less than 40kb for the big 745 image, vs 100,300,kb or whatever. Some of mine are under 25kb. Start with quality factor of 25 in Photoshop with 0.2 blur, and see how it looks. Anything with lots of red needs higher to avoid distortion.

Set images to progressive not optimized when saving to web from image application; don’t embed meta data unless you must have copyright info in there for legal reasons.

If you wrangle the many many suggestion image compression issues for your mobile score it will help your rating as mobile is all about speed of stuff loading on page; and if you have 10 photos all twice the size they could be, that is your issue right there for most things! 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

There is no reason your logo should “suddenly” stop working. Try putting the link to logo into web browser to make sure its still there – and then figure out whey it’s been deleted which should not happen; also check to see if something you updated lately changed the system in some way, such as new plugin, new widget, etc., then “go backward” by removing bad widget/plugin temporarily and see if logo comes back.

Just a suggestion while waiting for Lucian/Marius to follow up here. 🙂

HI, Lucian
I wasn’t talking so much about the entire sidebar, just the backing color of the blocks behind the text for each widget header.

For example the color of the text behind the header titles in the sidebar widgets seems to be controlled by the default/custom “site color” — however, in my case I want to use brighter color as default, but more muted for the sidebar text blocks/headers for the sidebar widgets, if that makes sense 🙂

Chris

I’m assuming you figured out solution for the gravatar/author photo? And presumably the web safe fonts, and scaling back some of the pix on page perhaps?

Curious what you did for author photo.

@Lukao350
you don’t need to do multiple posts for same issue. This has nothing to do with PageSpeed. So you should post the question as NEW topic for support 🙂

Lucian or Marius from TagDiv support will answer stuff as soon as they are back in at their local business hours.

You are super duper welcome ! 🙂

Also of note is that a “newspaper” doesn’t have monthly editions like a magazine, but is typically a daily, and WP has built in daily and monthly archive pages automatically.

For a magazine site, We did the same thing as others which was create a category called “editions” and then made sub-categories from that, such as Issue 01, Issue 02, etc. which were sub-categories of Editions (and so the hierarchical menus would work in sidebar).

Then we could also make a top menu of “back issues” which led to the most recent five issues, and then an “older” link. Then we created a single “page” which had shortcode to list all the categories from Editions as a UL lineup of the editions.

Just some more food for thought 🙂

Wellllllll…. I had trade some posts with RADU on this topic in hopes he might add a custom field on the user page for an author image loaded locally (this can be hacked from the functions.php file; I did this with one of my own responsive themes in 2011 pre-bootstrap which was insane — three column layouts without bootstrap were really a freaking pain for responsive; float right inside a float right … ugh!).

This was on my to do list before I got sick … and was just thinking the same thing 🙂

You would think there would be plugin for this, since really all it takes is adding new field to user meta for each user; then calling that from the theme author box template.

This may be my Labor Day weekend project ! 🙂

example how to on this topic of adding custom user meta
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/09/10/adding-and-using-custom-user-profile-fields

in the above case we’d be replacing a twitter field with a user photo field, where we could put in local URL to the user photo (e.g., /uploads/my-name-here_100x100.jpg); then call that in the Newspaper theme.

@mehedi

“web safe fonts” refers to fonts built in to all web browsers (Google “web safe fonts”). So if you change your default fonts in your style.css file to not use ANY Google fonts, then you don’t need to load any fonts from Google (I’m using the gill sans “stack” myself). Then comment out the call to the google fonts in your functions.php file (line 48 I think, if memory serves).

This is a nice info page I usually refer people to:
http://cssfontstack.com/

To load Google fonts via your own CSS, this means that if you look at the line in your functions.php which would be loading the default google fonts for the theme (like pt sans and roboto or whatever), simply open the CSS from that link, and copy the CSS which is being loaded from Google …. then put that CSS at bottom of your style.css file … this way you’re loading the fonts directly from your CSS; not loading a CSS file externally which then loads the Google fonts … you’re cutting out a step, and removing one external file load over which you have no control. I do this on our main business site to load Open Sans from Google directly. This is a common fix for using Google fonts which has been around a few years now. 🙂

Hope that made sense.

I really need to write an ebook on this stuff with examples! 😉

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Some of the things I noticed on his site was not using the gravatar, which is a major slowdown, and also he’s limiting the number of thumbs on page, such as not having four big “related stories” images at bottom of post, and as I suggested he’s using only the share buttons vs the number shares buttons.

I just checked one of my pages, which does not have js/css minified, and has gravatar, and has an ajax slider top right AND four images for related posts. This page has a “90” on PageSpeed Insights with both AdSense, and Disqus running. And one of those things is loading Google Analytics even though I am not. I’m not using a caching plugin either. So, in my case I need to consider changing the related posts, figure out how to cache or save the author image locally vs from gravatar, and possibly remove the big image slider top right of each page … which would reduce payload of page by a lot. And I need to minify my main js and style.css files, and retest. I haven’t looked at this since before I got sick, and have been working on something else which pays the bills vs the fun stuff, but need to get back to that obviously 🙂 And even worse, I don’t think I’ve updated the theme to 4.x on the test page (still 3.9.2). Doh. I suppose I should catch up on following my own advice! My non WP site has 97/100 for desktop, and 93/100 mobile.

What blows my mind, as it were, is the 99/100 user experience rating for mobile that Shashank has. May I say “wow” 🙂

Well, several things you can do
1) use only text ads from adsense, so images are not loaded (one big issue right there)
2) very aggressive caching and/or proper CDN
3) fast server (less than 300msec response time)
4) avoid stuff like photon or other stuff loading off wordpress
5) optimize your social media stuff; use share buttons not the numerical crap that needs to go “fetch” numbers for EACH button
6) load fonts from your own CSS not from Google CSS; or use web safe fonts ONLY
7) limit use of plugins which slow down your php
8) optimize your config.php file to include paths to your resources
9) do not use child theme which uses css redirect which google does *not* like
etc.

I’m sure Shashank could likely provide a single “round up” of all the stuff he’s done in the particular case of his own site. I just tested one of his pages, which as a desktop score of 93, mobile 86; which is pretty damn impressive with adsense and disqus running!
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.styzic.com%2Fgadgets%2Fiphone%2Fbigger-iphone-6l%2F491%2F&tab=desktop

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

TO ALL:

Christopher Simmons

August 27, 2014 at 8:50 pm #19552

As you may know from my own prior posts in the pagespeed topic, you may find it more helpful to test for speed with stuff like adsense, external things like addthis/sharethis or shareaholic, disqus, turned OFF, as there is not much you can do about those elements for speed beyond async loading. This gives you what I call your “raw score” which is better to see what your work on optimization actually does.

The “theory” in the webdev industry is that if you get your raw score taken care of, then when you switch back on the googleverse stuff which invariably shows problems with their own systems vis a vis pagespeed, you can presume Google “subtracts” their own content from the “functional score” … in using speed as a “signal” for ranking, beyond user experience.

Just for those pulling their hair out on this topic (been there!) 🙂

My other advice: don’t eat toast around your keyboard, unless you want to keep a key puller, alcohol, swabs, and a can of compressed air handy!!

Hi, Mehidi
I just posted a comment about this on another post which I’ll repeat here as my empirical wisdom on the topic of suffering Google issues the past 20 years. 🙂

————-

Christopher Simmons

August 27, 2014 at 8:50 pm #19552

As you may know from my own prior posts in the pagespeed topic, you may find it more helpful to test for speed with stuff like adsense, external things like addthis/sharethis or shareaholic, disqus, turned OFF, as there is not much you can do about those elements for speed beyond async loading. This gives you what I call your “raw score” which is better to see what your work on optimization actually does.

The “theory” in the webdev industry is that if you get your raw score taken care of, then when you switch back on the googleverse stuff which invariably shows problems with their own systems vis a vis pagespeed, you can presume Google “subtracts” their own content from the “functional score” … in using speed as a “signal” for ranking, beyond user experience.

Just for those pulling their hair out on this topic (been there!) 🙂

My other advice: don’t eat toast around your keyboard, unless you want to keep a key puller, alcohol, swabs, and a can of compressed air handy!!

———————

For Google fonts; use my trick mentioned elsewhere …

1) grab the CSS from google which is being loaded from your functions.php for the fonts you’re using;
2) paste the css into bottom of your style.css file, so you’re loading the CSS in your own file and not loading externally — does 2 things, removes the css loading from their server with the funky expiration, versioning, etc., and reduces external load by one file!

Also: note if you’re having http://www.yoursite redirected to yoursite without the www, then do NOT test your site using the www as that will give you bad results 100% of the time. Use the actual URL that your page “resolves” to on the internet, such as http://yoursite.xyz.

I usually over-ride this in the functions.php file as best way.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_excerpt

Don’t forget WordPress has awesome documentation on a lot of this kind of thing.

To wit:
Control Excerpt Length using Filters

By default, excerpt length is set to 55 words. To change excerpt length to 20 words using excerpt_length filter, add the following code to functions.php file in your theme:

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
	return 20;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

Please see the sticky topic top of the forum on optimizing your site for Google PageSpeed. Try using the GTMetrix site to test your speed, as GTMetrix will give you specific info on WHAT needs to be fixed at server level, image compression, slow loading, etc. in more detail.

For example for your server you need to
1) consider faster server account
2) turn on gzip/deflate on server (ask hosting provider)
3) set expiration headers, which can be done from htaccess file on Apache based servers
4) optimize your images, using something like smushit, and/or set compression level with your functions.php file and then regenerate all thumbs; make sure your images you upload are compressed as small as possible from photoshop or whatever you’re using (e.g., quality of 30 if you can, 52 for anything with reds; or try “medium” jpeg quality when save for web).

Those items above are good for about 30 points, and have nothing to do with the theme, but are necessary for ANY WordPress site.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

As you may know from my own prior posts in the pagespeed topic, you may find it more helpful to test for speed with stuff like adsense, external things like addthis/sharethis or shareaholic, disqus, turned OFF, as there is not much you can do about those elements for speed beyond async loading. This gives you what I call your “raw score” which is better to see what your work on optimization actually does.

The “theory” in the webdev industry is that if you get your raw score taken care of, then when you switch back on the googleverse stuff which invariably shows problems with their own systems vis a vis pagespeed, you can presume Google “subtracts” their own content from the “functional score” … in using speed as a “signal” for ranking, beyond user experience.

Just for those pulling their hair out on this topic (been there!) 🙂

My other advice: don’t eat toast around your keyboard, unless you want to keep a key puller, alcohol, swabs, and a can of compressed air handy!!

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.
• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.