Yep. I did the same thing 🙂

Don’t forget to clear your W3 Cache completely as your page is being cached, and might have mix of old/new stuff going to browser. Might or might not be the issue. Just took quick peek.

I don’t work here; just killing some time while waiting for my system to backup 🙂

Hi, Stefan
for one of our projects in past we created a “droplet” in Photoshop to resize everything, and then dragged folder onto droplet. Hard to do with WP pix if you have only the folder on server with all the thumbs. If you had an original work folder on a PC/Mac with files in one folder, that’s a super easy way to batch it.

Also, on our live site (vs the test site), it appears the theme gracefully will put a gray box in back, as we used to have 600px images with our old theme, so this doesn’t look too hideous, as so:
http://ga-ga.com/1020/area-code-666-part-15-parte-quince/

Not sure if that helps. 🙂

Note to all, we found it’s better to manually minify the main style.css file each update.

HERE IS HOW TO:

The easy way to minify your main style.css file, is to
1) in your theme folder, make a copy of the style.css file (rename style-bak.css or whatever)
2) take the style.css file and open in a text editor (NOT a word processor), like Notepad or TextPad on Windows, or similar.
3) copy and paste all the text from the file into a minifcation online tool like one of these:
– http://refresh-sf.com/yui/
– http://cssminifier.com/
4) copy the “minified” output into a new style.css file
5) upload via FTP to over-write the style.css file in your theme root

Now when you run PageSpeed Insights it won’t bug you anymore. I do this and works just fine.

r1kay
to clarify, mod_pagespeed is not a WordPress plugin, but is used at the server level and is being used by many “speed oriented” web hosting providers now, including many that specialize in WP hosting specifically (and larger folk like GoDaddy, etc.).

The easy way to minify your main style.css file, is to
1) in your theme folder, make a copy of the style.css file (rename style-bak.css or whatever)
2) take the style.css file and open in a text editor (NOT a word processor), like Notepad or TextPad on Windows, or similar.
3) copy and paste all the text from the file into a minifcation online tool like one of these:
– http://refresh-sf.com/yui/
– http://cssminifier.com/
4) copy the “minified” output into a new style.css file
5) upload via FTP to over-write the style.css file in your theme root

Now when you run PageSpeed Insights it won’t bug you anymore. I do this and works just fine.

If none of that is remotely possible for you to do, then don’t stress over it. You only gain maybe a point for doing this, along with a couple of other things. Image optimization is far more important, and limiting use of plugins which “dial out” from your site to load things on the page beyond your content (social media “counters” for instance – plain buttons load faster).

You likely haven’t seen mention of mod_pagespeed as you have not been looking through the “pinned” topic at top of forum on “Pagespeed” issues.

Note when minifying the css file, it will save 20% of the space, but it doesn’t speed anything up by 20% or improve rating by 20%. If it saves more than 20kb then it’s worth it. If it saves less than 20kb may not be worth the trouble.

ALSO: be aware each time you update theme you will need to re-compress the style sheet using one of the tools above.

Hope that helped.

Hi,
you might try “The Unarchiver” which is free in the Mac app store.

This does support the 7-zip file format.

What I use personally on BOTH my Macs and PCs is the robust, awesome and super useful WIN-RAR, which is $29 but will decompress ANYTHING:
http://www.win-rar.com/download.html?&L=0

🙂

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Zeus
I think if you paste multiple things into the “ad slots” boxes, you might be duplicating code. I think if you use the async method using the adsense box with “async” ad “type”, the “code” (call to Google) only loaded once, then each size in each slot calls the async/responsive unit. Likely the way you were doing it originally caused some kind of “limit” on ads from Google, -or- some code cancelled the other out.

Might be wrong, but that’s how it works for me.

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

interesting new WORDPRESS PLUGIN BY GOOGLE (!)

http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-publisher/

And for peace of mind, check your pagespeed with adsense off and social media links off to see your “true score” as it were.

Zeus
first thing to do is to check your page source that the data needed is there under META tags, and the footer inserted by theme.

Second, use Google’s tool to check for the author link works.

Hi, Zeus
you can put the expiration and such at bottom; at least that’s what I do 🙂

I usually have my

Redirect 301s at top

then the
# WORDPRESS block for permalinks

then the expiration stuff.

Chris

Hi, Tarquisti
I don’t work here, just helping out while my other monitor is doing something (I work with two Apple 23-inch LED IPS cinema diaplays side by side at angle… sometimes I’m waiting on something and go surfin’ … like here).

Anyway, I looked at one of your smoothie articles, and did see you had correct info in head

<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/+MelissaAlbers" />

and based on that matching in the footer from theme field
<a href="https://plus.google.com/+MelissaAlbers?rel=author">

However, for our sites, we found we had to add the /posts to get “seen” properly, as so:
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/+ChristopherSimmons/posts"/>

It shouldn’t make a difference, I suppose, but try it and see if it works. 🙂

(AND: this presumes you’ve got to your Google+ account and are pointing your Albers account at the website.)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hi, Radu!

I’m just glad you figured out a way to do the async ads (remember my post way back in the “coding” category). That is one tricky beast!

By the way … one way to make a quick and easy “web safe fonts” methodology for folks would be to change the default fonts in your main style.css to something like this:

font-family: Segoe, "Segoe UI", "DejaVu Sans", "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, sans-serif

font-family: Constantia, "Lucida Bright", "DejaVu Serif", Georgia, serif

and then by default folks could simply leave fonts as “default” in the theme customizer; -or- switch on the Google fonts if they needed them.

This would be a super simple way for you to answer everybody’s thing about fallback to web-safe fonts without having to recode.

Just use the above in your style vs the Google fonts, and then let people turn “on” the Google fonts to match your demo.

OR: you could provide an alt-stlye.css using above replacement, and then tell folks in docs to rename to style.css to use web safe fonts.

Just an idea 🙂 (I was playing around with that).

Of course, this doesn’t solve the load of the fonts in the functions.php file by default, but a savvy person could strip that out if they knew they only wanted to use web fonts.

I could post a how-to on this ‘hack’ but I’m going to presume at some point it would be better to have the Google fonts be optional “all off” and “don’t load in header the pulls to Google CDN” vs doing hacks.

Thinking out loud. 🙂

OKAY! My bad (big giant D’OH!!!)

Not a bug.

If I followed the actual documentation (“RTFM”), it shows to grab only the publisher ID without the “ca-” …
so using just pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
vs ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
.. worked first time out.

However, on the page the ad is flush top to logo area vs vertically aligned.
As here: http://ga-ga.com/1228/likely-happened-royalties-sugar-man/

Can’t figure out why I’m getting an extra “ca-” on page seemingly from nowhere.

@zeus
not sure this helps:
1) go to your WP admin, left side under Settings > General
2) on the ‘general’ page you can set your blog title (name) and short description
( Use this instead of Theme > customizer > tagline )

Sometimes this will not work from the theme customizer panel, due to ownership permissions of the site (e.g., if WP installed from hosting panel vs from FTP manually).

With YOAST SEO, you can “also” override, or add to that by going to, from WP admin, left side
SEO > Titles and Metas > Home Tab
here you can enter meta description and keywords (if you have keywords ‘on’ in Yoast).

Hope that helps.

FYI: I turned the ad spots off so as to not end up with negative issues with Google’s systems for the moment. Code will not appear in the live pages at this time.

@Octavian
you may find tools like this one fun to test your site on different devices (this one free; the pro versions are typically $20/month and more full featured);
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/

@circuitsports

ooooh, ahhhhh 🙂

I’m suffering trying to do as much on our high speed server with local caching, mod_pagespeed, common stuff cached to RAM and 1GIG dedicated switch to server in SoftLayer with 7 inbound pipes. Pain in butt. Getting there. 🙂

Hi, @evdb
glad all the rambling helped 🙂

For those who are trying to work with the “step up” on speed from caching, such as using mod_pagespeed and then an optimized .htaccess code block, I found this article super helpful, and is somebody else who is a couple steps ahead of my efforts with the whole “make the server do the work, not a plugin” mentality.

http://customerhelp.co.za/wordpress/optimizing-linux-apache-for-wordpress-blogs-memcached-mod_pagespeed-expires-headers-mod_deflate-gzip.html

Hi, Dreamsiter

we have this same issue where we have our “mothership” news system, and then some satellite sites which pull the text image via a feed as syndicated content. Obviously no way to make a featured image doing this using the modern WordPress “auto thumbnail” setup that relies on server side image libraries (old themes used a thumbnail php script, like timthumb or modded variant to write custom files — Woo still does this as fallback for instance, and you can use that to pull images from other sites by adding allowed domain to thumb.php file) ….

So, how to get this to work — while ‘regenerate thumbnail’ plugin works great for old stuff, doesn’t help with new … so, I found one plugin that we’ve used successfully, and is also available on themeforest [correction: one of Envato’s sister sites, actually, CodeCanyon] for $7
http://codecanyon.net/item/auto-post-thumbnail-pro/4322624

Cheap enough to try and see if it works for you (above is a regular URL, not an affiliate link or promoted link). It will auto set first image as ‘featured’ and was the best solution we found for this exact issue.

There may be other ones in the wordpress.org plugins repository, but most seems fraught with old old code, not current in past couple of years, so use any such with major caution.

$7 is worth the try. 🙂

(I have no relationship with the plugin or developer — just suggested.)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.

Hey! Note the pesky issue with Chrome is that they will run an auto-update while you’re using the thing, and then the cache seems to go out of whack. I often launch Chrome now, and then if I go to a page and it is working weird, I go check in IE11, then go back to Chrome and it usually has updated itself. Clear history/cache (maybe something to do every Monday morning as a habit… I dunno). Has to do with handling the CSS and any local caching directives on the page. I was having this issue with our font awesome loading off CDN the other day… all the icons were missing, driving me nuts. 🙂

Happy New Year to you also 🙂

My hope is to be a better person for myself and others this year, revitalize my own business which took a bit of a hit the past 2 years due to economy in U.S.

My hope for this particular theme is that you continue to develop and focus on it being a newspaper/magazine theme and not a “one size fits all” theme (e.g., most magazines are not stores, so wasting a ton of time on ecommerce stuff can detract from optimization for magazine and newspaper publishing things which the theme is focused on). I’d love to see a CSS style map of post page elements to make it easy to customize some things using custom.css or append to child theme style.css etc. (e.g., Google now wants to see UX enhancements for mobile and is whining about the breadcrumb, headline, and “categories” buttons above featured photo being too close together so I now need to make the category buttons larger with more space around them so they can be “tappable” … sigh).

You’ve done a great job with this product, and here’s hoping for your continued success!

Chris

Hmm., @mbasche
that’s kind of cool, actually. Will have to try it and see if it plays nice with mod_pagespeed.

Hoping to NOT have to do any more hacking to templates since I already have to fix something in the main template, the hit counter module (we had existing system and field), and the author name on hack. So, trying not to add anything more to “insert here in code for something” if I can help it.

Will check it out! 🙂

Holiday PageSpeed Fun Report Update!
Just as a pagespeed comment, I was testing mod_pagespeed, vs your tagdiv cache experimental, and W3 with page cache on, and found that mod_pagespeed on server with memcache, optcache and eaccelerator, seem to be about the same effect. What this means for most WordPress folks is quite simple: use a hosting provider that supports mod_pagespeed (e.g., GoDaddy now supports it with htaccess local config options — NOT an advert for them, just anecdotal) may be better option than messing around with all the various plugins that try to replicate that server-side functionality.

To Radu and all … who are wondering about the “render blocking blah blah” errors, this was one of the suggested solutions for WP (note the issue is common to ALL WP themes frankly due to the way the header works for most themes based on “traditional” HTML practice, 2 years ago nobody really cared about this issue!):

(QUOTED from WordPress.org discussion, “wpgeekster”)
The reason you are getting render blocking message from google is because your javascript is being called in the header. In your wp_register_script() function and in your wp_enqueue_script() function you must include true for the $in_footer argument. If you include the $in_footer argument, you must also include all the other arguments.
See:
http://wp.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-include-javascript-and-css-in-your-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_enqueue_script
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_register_script

(END QUOTE)

From same discussion:

(QUOTED from “manuelkuhs”)
Here’s what I figured out about how to eliminate all render-blocking JS & CSS:

Install W3 Total Cache

Go to Minify

Use the “help” wizard that you can see as a button near the top

Accept the suggestions without making changes. This will combine all your CSS files into 1, and all your JS files into 1, 2 or 3, depending where you load them (if you load all in the same area, e.g. in the <head>, you’ll only get 1 combined file).

Set all JS to “Non-blocking using Async”.

Now test your site. If everything works, the only blocking CSS/JS file left should be your combined CSS file, and nothing else.

Most likely some JS functions won’t work properly anymore. If this is the case, it gets a bit more complicated.

In this case, try the following:
Remove all the JS files in the Minify settings of W3

Open the source of your functioning page where no JS files are combined and manually add to W3 Minify ONLY the JS files found in the header (since these are the ones “above the fold”) and IN THE ORDER that they exist in your source file. Try this. If it works, try moving them all into the <body> or just before the </body> using the Minify JS settings.

In my case, I had a strange issue whereby combining jquery.js with the other JS files broke many js functions that depend on jquery even though they loaded after. To get around this I made jquery.js load on its own after <body>, and made all the others load combined just before </body>, with everything set to load using async.

Using this method, the only “above the fold” problem I have is the combined CSS sheet.

If your combined CSS is small, you can try inlining the entire thing.

If not, the only way around this that I currently know is to manually inline only the relevant parts of this combined CSS, and then to load the combined CSS in the footer using JS.
(END QUOTE)

• This reply was modified 12 years by simchris.