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[Eric]

I recently took steps to increase my page load time based on the recommendations of various sources (ex: https://community.theme.co/kb/performance/). The first thing I did was direct my website to a CDN (cloudflare), then I downloaded a caching plugin (w3 total cache), combined my external JS and CSS using a minifying plugin (Autoptimize), and then based on the pingdom results I added a few other plugins aimed at solving my performance issues (such as the ‘Remove query strings from static resources’ plugin and the ‘Far Future Expiration plugin’). In the end not only did my website not improve in speed but it actually got considerably slower. Although the pingdom’s load time is slightly faster than it was originally, when I load the website on my browser it’s way slower than it’s ever been. As a troubleshoot, I was told to try deactivating all of my plugins one by one to see if one of them could be causing the issue, however even after doing that the speed didn’t seem to change, regardless of which plugin I deactivated. I’ve already gone through a number of forums with the hope of finding a fix, however nothing I’ve tried seems to help.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Eric]

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[Joao]

Hi There,

Yes if you notice that after installing this plugins your website your website got slower it means they are probably not well setup or conflicting with each other.

I pretty don´t use optimization plugins on my websites, but this is a personal choice, I just take care that the images have a good size and are compressed, but I guess I am not really picky about 1 or 2 seconds.

Regarding your case the best is to turn off one plugin by one and check if the speed improves that way you can find out what plugin is causing the issue and fix it or eliminate it.

Hope that helps

Joao

[Eric]

Hey sorry but is there no other way to find out what’s causing the issues? Because I’ve already tried turning them off one by one and I still haven’t been able to figure it out. I was hoping you’d be able to run a quick test just to see if there’s any glaring issues that would be obvious to a seasoned developer. Let me know if there’s any other options.

And thanks again

[Eric]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Rad]

Hi Eric,

Would you mind disabling your Rocket loader first? It’s mostly the cause, though it should work with the cornerstone. But since there are CloudFlare and caches, the rocket loader might be loading the wrong cached version compared to latest copy from actual files.

Thanks!

[Eric]

Hey thanks, turns out rocket loader was the issue. I just have one quick follow-up question while we’re on the topic of speed.

I just want to know what’s ideal in terms of my page size for this type of theme (ethos). I’m currently sitting at 5.8 MB page size but I’m going to be optimizing all of my website’s images manually (before I used ‘smushit’, which helped a bit but not much), and so I’d just like to have an idea of what page size I should aim for.

Thanks for all your help!

[Joao]

Hi Eric,

I am not sure that is the right question.

This is really just one aspect, of course, the smaller the page size the better. But one page that quick loads but doesn´t bring the user a nice experience or don´t have a good content will also not suceed.

The ideal is to find a balance between all, just make sure you have your images optmized don´t abuse on effects(5 sliders in one page for example) and this type of stuff and you will be good, not really something to worry much I guess.

Try also using http://www.tinypng.com before uploading your images than use smush on top of it. And of course taking care that your image dimensions make sense with the way they are being used. No 1000px x 2000px where you need just 200px x 400px
Hope that helps

Joao
Joao

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