Optimizing site/theme for speed

Sparkling
1

Hello,

now that my site is almost set up, I’m finding it somewhat slow, despite my efforts to limit the use of plugins and to try and be as barebones as possible.

I ran a few different speed test tools and they all suggested that I have too much javascript and css. Since much of that has to do with theme, I was wondering if you could recommend your best suggestions for improving those things.

Should I:
a) inline the CSS as this site says? http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/inline-small-css.html
b) defer javascript as he says here? http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/defer-loading-javascript.html
c) just use an optimizer like this plugin offers? Autoptimize – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

I don’t want to break the theme, I like it a lot, lol.

Also, if you could offer your thoughts on whether I should:
d) switch from WP Super Cache to W3 Total cache? I have not enabled super cache yet as I wanted to keep building/testing for a day or two.
e) enable gzip compression

And anything else you can suggest to improve speed. Thanks!!
My site is http://letsnba.com

Cheers
LN

PS. If you could tell me which part of the css refers to the “topic tags” that would be great. I would like them to be darker, the light grey is pretty hard to see.

2

Woohoo! I figured out how to enable gzip compression via W3 Total Cache. This improved my pagespeed result by 16 points.

Now I just need to know if there’s anything I can do with the javascript to help improve site load times. I don’t mind disabling the theme JS completely if I that is possible. I tried running the site with NoScript and the only thing that happened was that my fonts went all wonky lol. Not sure why that is.

Thanks!

3

To score in 80/100 level on Google Page Speed insights you should do the following:

  1. Optimize your images. You can use plugin such as this one that will do it automatically for all new images. And you cun run it to optimize all existing images: Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

  2. Properly configure W3 Total Cache. While you do have it enabled you will have to spend days testing it and tweaking it as there are loads of features available for it. You haven’t even enabled the main functionality such as database and object cache.

  3. Get rid of shared hosting and use VPS (Digital Ocean, Linode or other) or fully managed WordPress hosting such as WPEngine, Kinsta, Pagely or other. It is going to take more time and knowledge to manage VPS but the price will be the same as for shared hosting. For fully managed hosting you will pay much more but if you really care about website performance then it is the only way to go.

  4. Try minifying all CSS and JavaScript files that comes with theme and plugins. Combining them might cause some functions not to work properly (it should be tested as it really depends on your website configuration) but minification will do wonders for your website. W3 Total Cache does have a functionality for this as well.

The main issue here is your hosting and you can do whatever optimizations you want but if hostings sucks then other things are pointless.

4

Thanks Aigars. I appreciate the thorough response!