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Low Google PageSpeed rank for mobile devices

in Rife Posts: 9
Hi,

we have really low score for mobile devices. Its currently 28 after few modifications and adding following plugins for optimization
Cloudflare CDN with
offical Cloudflare plugin for Wordpress
Cloudflare Flexible SSL
WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache
ShortPixel Image Optimizer for image compression
Autooptimize for JS and CSS compression
and
WP Fastest Cache

Our Cloudflare CDN account is not Pro but Free but afaik there should be no issues with Pro vs Free for such a small website.

We tried a lot of different suggestions by developer we are currently working with but he is forcing us to purchase another theme which is optimized for mobile phone. He set up a test version online few days ago and it really was high score (67 for mobile and 85 for desktop) but we do not wish to purchase new theme cause we spent hours searching for perfect theme and your theme was our final choice among many.

Other plugins we have installed are
Akismet Anti-Spam
Apollo13 Framework Extensions
Duplicate Post
Elementor
Elementor Pro
Rife Elementor Extensions & Templates
WPForms Lite
Yoast SEO Premium

All plugins as well as themes have been paid for and licensed for our site.

Our Google Page Speed score
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=http://opr8.agency/&tab=mobile

Test done by Pingdom says 78/100, grade C
Performance grade C 78/100, +6 (8.33%) grade upgrade with listed plugins
Load time 1.81S, -934ms (33.99%) load speed upgrade with listed plugins
No much decrease in size of site though
Page size, 2.67MB, -28.3KB (1.03%) image size decrease with listed plugins

and
Requests 76, -37 (32.74%) number of request decrease with listed plugins

Our website address is
https://www.opr8.agency/

Any suggestion is welcomed :)

Best regards,
Marin

Comments

  • AirAir
    Posts: 10,970
    Hello :-)
    Cokaric said: We tried a lot of different suggestions by developer we are currently working with but he is forcing us to purchase another theme which is optimized for mobile phone.

    If by switching theme, with the same content you will get real score bump, then I would listen to this developer and switch. This is not what you want to hear :-)

    Optimizing WordPress site for test scores is very tricky and requires some knowledge.
    I have run the test with an imported Unicorn design on our fast server - the result is 39 points.
    However, if I disable all plugins and run it again it is now 73 points, however, the site doesn't look good - check here http://a13test.kinsta.cloud/

    To optimize it really good you need to know in what order things should be loaded to not hurt performance, but also to not hurt the look of the website.

    So it is not "just switch the theme and you score will fly" :-) Anyone chasing the score in such a test will face it sooner or later.

    It is not much direct help, but true about how it works, and what you have to take into account while optimizing.

    With kind regards.
  • Posts: 9
    Air said: However, if I disable all plugins and run it again it is now 73 points, however, the site doesn't look good - check here http://a13test.kinsta.cloud/
    Hi @Air, thank you for your answer. Yes site does not look good. It looks really bad now :(

    We are processing few more suggestions and will report after what we have done. It jumped to 30 now after compressing all pictures with ShortPixel (it dropped yesterday to 21 idk why) and changing TTL for all files server over Cloudflare from 1 day to 1 month.

    Best regards,
    Marin
  • edited June 2020 Posts: 9
    Hello,

    current score is
    Google PageSpeed
    Mobile 56/100
    Desktop 94/100

    Pingdom
    88/100
    Load 985ms
    Page size 1.7MB
    Requests 68

    Cloudflare was reverted back to 1 day TTL.

    If I change Browser Cache TTL to 1 month then scores are pretty same
    Google PageSpeed
    Mobile 59/100
    Desktop 93/100

    Pingdom
    88/100
    Load 950ms
    Page size 1.7MB
    Requests 68

    PageSpeed
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http://www.opr8.agency/&tab=mobile

    URL
    http://www.opr8.agency/

    Idk why but Add Expires headers doesn't increase from score 56 like it did before on Pingdom and neither does the Google Page Speed score change much like before when we increased the Browser Cache TTL even though we Purged all caches before testing (Cloudflare, Autoptomize, Fastest Cache).

    We converted all pictures to WebP and we converted YT video that was loading in one of the section on the website to WebM with file size 800KB, it was not optimized using ShortPixel since its not supported. I suppose that was max we could compress it. It was 3MB in MP4 format, 42MB in gif format and 14MB in compressed and optimized GIF format with ShortPixel. We also removed all Youtube JS that was loading on home page. Seems like that did the trick.

    We started from ... :)
    Google PageSpeed
    Mobile 15/100
    Desktop 50/100

    Pingdom
    72/100
    Load 2.57s
    Page size 2.7MB
    Requests 113

    Developer is not much cooperative when it comes to suggestions how to improve score on this theme which is annoying cause he still thinks main issue is Elementor and that we should stop and switch to new theme.

    Any future suggestion is welcomed from anyone.

    Best regards,
    Marin
    Post edited by Cokaric on
  • AirAir
    Posts: 10,970
    Hey :)
    Cokaric said: cause he still thinks main issue is Elementor and that we should stop and switch to new theme.
    He is right :-)

    Let me explain: Elementor is a page builder plugin. There are many such plugins but Elementor is one of the best when it comes to ease of use.

    However, everything has its costs. With Page builders, they have to produce additional CSS files and add additional JS libraries. All of this results in additional resources, for which you will lose score points in such tests, like PageSpeed Insights.

    Even if you will switch to the different builders, it is still built in a similar manner.
    You can switch to DIVI, WPBakery, Visual Composer or anything else - they all produce similar issues because of the nature of those plugins.

    When you use tools such as page builders, or ready themes, you lose control of how many CSS and JS files will be included. On the other hand authors of such plugins and themes also have to take into account that each user has different needs for their site, and they can not heavily optimize everything as this would hit your website in another way, like too big JS & CSS files(we are talking about even few MegaBytes per page).

    You can already see that Google reports that there are not fully used CSS rules, and they should be removed. On one page some rules are used, on another other rules. Everything packed in one CSS file for optimization. However, such a test will not tell you this, as it only scans the current page.

    The bottom line is, that is you want to max your score in such tests you would have to build your website with as few tools as possible. If you still want to use WordPress, you should use a lightweight theme, and don't use any page builders, and only rely on theme styles for the content. Your score for sure will jump like I have showed you in the previous post.

    In other words: You lose flexibility -> you gain score.

    Like I have said before -> don't focus so much on those scores, as you will only lose much time, and in the end, you can gain new issues on some other places, like "too heavy cache" issues.

    Another typical issue: you use autooptimize plugin to connect all your CSS files into one big CSS file. It results in higher score, as now you have 1 900KB CSS file, which is fast to download, instead of 10 CSS files. However, as on each page, you have 1 small CSS file that is created for only this page, it results in this that for each page you have different 900KB CSS file that user have to download. But if you didn't do optimization he would download let say 850KB CSS once on the first visit, and only around 50KB of different CSS per each page. How much faster your sub page would load then!

    We optimized what we could for our apollo13themes.com, but it really required to check and know which scripts and CSS can be connected into one and which should stay as independent files.

    There are many tutorials that say Optimization to get score 100/100 is easy just do 10 steps or something. It is not true.
    Even experienced developers will have a very hard time optimizing website, without sacrificing flexibility, as you don't have control over everything when you are using CMS like WordPress.

    I don't know if there are any optimization experts for WordPress, that don't require you to switch everything, but there should be as this is filed for experts that know how real life WordPress sites are built.

    With kind regards.
  • Posts: 9
    Hi @Air

    it's such a shame you are the only one always responding to all my questions. Its really nice to read all this suggestions and I will surely try all of them one by one until I try to squeeze a bit more from our website. Will require multiple trial and error but I think its doable. At least to get to 60+ on mobile. Then I can put it to rest :wink:

    Except that I see that only way to do it properly would be to ask a right agency or a coder to do a optimization for us. If I am correct few of those service are offered by guys that
    Autoptimize, Short Pixel as well as WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache offer.

    Would you be able to recommend me one?
    Do you offer such service?

    Best regards,
    Marin
  • AirAir
    Posts: 10,970
    Hey :-)
    Cokaric said: Then I can put it to rest
    Great job :-) You are going strong!
    Cokaric said: If I am correct few of those service are offered by guys that
    Autoptimize, Short Pixel as well as WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache offer.

    Would you be able to recommend me one?
    Do you offer such service?
    We don't offer such a service, but I believe using one of which you have mentioned would be a way to go.

    Unfortunately, I don't have experience with any of those companies' services, but I believe as they build plugins for optimization, they have very high knowledge on this subject.

    If you will use their service and they recommend any changes in the theme, please let me know - I will happily improve theme in this manner :-)

    Sorry, for not being direct help in your struggle.

    With kind regards.
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