See the threads on page speed. Follow Radu’s recommendations for how he got the demo theme to be 90+.
REF: https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-make-the-site-faster/ .
To save you having to read Everything on the forum:
Fonts can’t be optimized on your side or by the theme, as they live on Google’s website. Digg buttons are loading from Digg’s website. No way to optimize that. I don’t think sharedaddy is part of theme. You either have to load the font stuff locally and optimize CSS since Google “dings” their own stuff in PageSpeed (!) or switch to web-safe fonts (see my and other comments above on this topic).
For styles, you need to either minify if you don’t intend to modify for your site; or use a WP minify plugin. See my link to the site I use to minify my css and js code.
WP by default loads elements in the head and “enqueues” them to render the page. All WP sites will have a “render blocking code” in head error. For javascript (.js files) You would need to try the optimization plugin included with theme, or a WP plugin which moves the js to footer “elegantly.”
Hope that helped. 87 is a great starting point and that means you’re in the “zone of safety” as I like to call it. 85 or below is “bad” 87-89 is okay. 90+ is rockin’. 😉
Chris
I think you can simply do a CSS override in child theme style.css
.entry-title { font-size:26px; font-family:Georgia,serif; font-weight:bold; }
not sure that is correct style, might be something like this — (this is probably wrong!)
.h1 entry-title { font-size:26px; font-family:Georgia,serif; font-weight:bold; }
I will be messing with this myself to add more leading above/below the header. Marius will likely answer more clearly before I get back on this. Just some ideas in case you’re anxious to mess with your custom.css to move on with your life …
It works for me. I use it to make the author box mini bios “smaller” since I make rest of the site text larger for better mobile/desktop experience, but then the bio gets huge.
Check that you’re stating the proper style, and class, and format that properly in the style.css file
e.g., to make the author box text a wee bit smaller (I made page text 15px);
.author-box-wrap .desc { font-size:13px; line-height:1.4em; }
OH… sorry, meant to say also, be sure you actually “activate” the child theme as your main theme … simply putting stuff in child folder won’t do anything unless you “activate” the Newspaper-child as your theme instead of Newspaper. This is one thing a lot of folks miss when working with child themes first time. 🙂
I think WP over-rides that as it’s not semantically correct to have <h2> tags inside of a <p> tag. So, a “block level” element like a sentence generally is itself either a <p> or <h> level element, based on my own experience (meaning a “headline” doesn’t go inside of another block level element – you can’t have an <h2> inside an <h1> or a <p> inside a <h2> technically.)
<h2>BLOCK <h3 (NO!)>OF</h3> TEXT</h2>
<p>Block of text</p>Likely you have to do that with a span.
So you might have
<h2>My headline here <span class="h2like">larger</span> is from <span class="h2like">Mars</span>, not Venus</h2>
Try making a CSS span for the size change inside a block level element. I had to do this for a flush right “about this book serial” element, since you can’t have a <div> inside a <p> either. <span> is the right way to do stuff inside other stuff with CSS3/HTML5 now.
This may not be correct answer,
but make sure “responsive” option is turned on in the theme customizer. You have option of responsive or not responsive. My site works fine on my iphone in portrait or landscape, and on iPad … I need to fix the advert for iphone portrait, however, on my site, I just noticed. Doh.
vidapropria
1) reduce image sizes either by running compression plugin and/or adding compression factor to your functions file
2) faster server account, if you keep seeing “slow response from server” error — that was a [!] item on your last report speed check — nothing can be done about that with the theme, or in WP; that is how fast the account you have and your hosting provider is responding to ping/start showing the page. For example if you have a $5/month account, upgrade to $10/month account (I’m just using that as example). Low cost accounts are usually on a machine or VPS being shared with 1,000+ other sites. Slightly more costly hosting accounts give more resources to each site, by sharing the resource pool with fewer domains.
Verify deflate/gzip working; remember this only serves up faster versions of your content, but doesn’t optimize them prior to that. I think I saw a 100K image file in your last report … that is waaaaaaaaay too big. Try using smushit plugin and regenerate thumbnails to see if that helps? (Backup images first as changes to images on server will be destructive — meaning they are changed and cannot be unchanged).
Also, for testing if you’re using a child theme, be sure to try NOT using a child theme to see if that gains you a point.
However RECOMMENDED:
1) optimize images before/after upload
2) look at better hosting – if you keep getting “slow to respond” error from Google — no way around that on your side.
3) test without using DISQUS, as this does slow things down. We stopped using it for that reason. We’re leaning toward phasing out comments on most sites, per industry practice now that most comments tend to be trolls and arguments (see: CNN for example). Any comments plugin really slows stuff down on WP. Unless you gain ad revenue from 10,000 visitors per day, it’s not really an essential plugin, and more of a glamour thing (in my opinion).
4) turn off all jetpack stuff for speed test — anything that connects to the WP/Automattic mothership adds latency.
Hope that helped 🙂
————–
as an aside on pagespeed errors:
I’m actually dealing with even more arcane stuff like how to enqueue the parent Theme’s style sheet in the child Theme’s functions.php, to bypass the annoying @import not recommended error from Google which the Automattic folks seem to think is a non-issue. I will post my efforts on THAT noise if anybody cares.
[ UPDATED ]
I just ran your GPS test, and saw you’re up to 82/100 desktop. So, looks like you’re making progress. The images issue is the next thing you need to resolve. You’ll have several points for that, as reducing the footprint of your images speeds up page (e.g., if you go from 300K to 150KB; that’s 50% less time loading images!).
For the minification stuff… note you would need to use a plugin for that (WPminify) although this has some issues; -or- you need to manually minify SOME resources which are not already reduced in size. RADU doesn’t minify all the code as developers have a hard time modifying code if they can’t read it.
So, if you knew there were a couple of large CSS/JS files you might want to minify, you can easily do that using an online tool (I use this one, although it won’t work with IE11/Win7 properly … use Chrome or similar: http://refresh-sf.com/yui/ )
Basically, “minification” of CSS and Java/js files removes the extra spaces, comments, and line breaks to make file “more compact” … so if you had a 125Kb CSS file, by removing all the spaces, line breaks, comments, it might end up being 100Kb, which is the kind of reduction that PageSpeed looks at — the idea being if you had 5 files being loaded on page and you reduced all of them by 20kb – well, that’s 100Kb and is larger than what website developers like me used for the entire page and graphics 10 years ago (we used to shoot for 50kb max page load, if you can imagine that!) …
Hi, vidapropria
don’t forget you still need to set expiration headers, and possibly get a faster hosting account – 4 seconds response is pretty slow on top of the page loading time.
You might try loading my suggested “expiration” data for your htaccess file (see other post on this topic), which goes at bottom of htaccess AFTER the wordpress stuff.
Looks like you need to
1) speed up server time to < 2 sec. if possible (try using a speed test closer to your country, if your site is regional and not international: use Google’s webpagetest.org and choose location closer to you)
2) set expiration headers – this is MANDATORY for page speed! (SEE: https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/what-is-your-googlespeed-value/ )
3) further optimize images using an image plugin like (WP Smush.it – or similar); backup images before running any plugin on your images, so that you can restore if unhappy with results.
Hope that helped. Try the expiration headers data for the htaccess file first. It really really helps!
