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So, I have had GP for a long time and this has been a constant issue for as long as I can remember. Finally, I am trying to do something about it. The problem is when you go to my site, it takes FOREVER for the grid of posts to load. This makes people think I don’t have any content and they click away. So, really this is costing me business.
I have tried all the other things, including de-activating all other plugins. Nothing seems to work. The second I de-activate this theme, and use a basic standard one, its fast again (but of course no grid option, like in GP).
Please help 🙂
my blog site is http://www.travisharris.com/blog
Customer Support
Hi Travis,
Couple of things to test:
– Does the speed improve if you disable the masonry option in the customizer?
– You will want to reduce the original image size. For example this one here:
https://www.screencast.com/t/fNxBI7p8BFd4The image uploaded is 3000 by 1685px and the actual image displayed is only 288 * 163px.
Then make sure all of them are optimized/compressed with a service like this:
https://imagecompressor.com/Hi Leo!
Wow, thanks so much for taking the time! Okay, I went ahead and disabled the masonry option. (what does this do, its hard to tell the difference in appearance). It may have helped. My PC I think is now just caching the page, lol.
I do use another image compression plugin called “Imagify”. I think tho, that the grid just uses the first image in my blog post as the thumbnail. So, this is why it needs to be a bit more hi res (so when people look at the images etc). But, they all I think are compressed to be as small as possible etc, for faster load times.
How does it load on your end? Is the page any faster, or does it take a crazy amount of time for it to load?
Hi Travis,
Don’t underestimate the impact of image size on page load. In my experience, images – and not code – are almost always a major culprit when a site is too slow.
As Leo pointed out, you are displaying an image at 288px wide, but it’s actually a 3000px wide image. So you are loading a file that’s more than 10x larger than necessary. If other images are similarly large that is absolutely your issue with speed.
You’ll want to set the size of the images on the grid page to something close to 288px. That might be medium thumbnail size. This won’t change the size of the original featured image itself. You’re only inserting a smaller size that WordPress automatically created when you uploaded the image.
Additionally, while Imagify and many other optimization plugins will help you reduce your file size to some degree, to get the most out of them you have to set them up right. And they’re not going to do anything about images that are actually 10x bigger than they look.
Note: There are some services that will serve your visitors correctly-sized images (e.g., ShortPixel Adaptive Images) even if you haven’t embedded the right size.
Don’t underestimate the impact of image size on page load. In my experience, images – and not code – are almost always a major culprit when a site is too slow.
Oh for sure. This I know 🙂 I have had my site revised many times over the past 11 years, lol. Learned a lot the hard way. For now, the image sizes that I have are working okay. They need to be this size for the actual blog post, to show my work correctly on HS screens etc. I use the Imagify to crunch the size down and so far I have been impressed with this.
The main issue I have, is JUST the homepage (grid). For example, if I switch and use a standard theme (other then GP), guess what? Things load fast 😉 So, this rules out the image size (in general).
You’ll want to set the size of the images on the grid page to something close to 288px. That might be medium thumbnail size. This won’t change the size of the original featured image itself. You’re only inserting a smaller size that WordPress automatically created when you uploaded the image.
This is interesting. I cant seem to see anywhere where I can change this?
EDIT – AH HA!!! I DO see this now. its under “Media Attachment Size”. It was set to “full” and now, I just dropped down to “Medium” and it loads snappy! I think THIS was it!
So far today, with simply changing (turning off) the masonry option, seems to have helped a lot. So, this is for sure part of the problem. I had a friend in another county just check my site, and it seemed to load faster now. So, Leo was correct this does impact the speed.
The masonry option uses the script but it shouldn’t cause a huge speed difference.
The image size is absolutely the major issue here 🙂
Yeah, I think I see now.. “Media Attachment Size”. It was set to “full” and now, I just dropped down to “Medium” and it loads snappy! I think THIS was it!
Booyah!
(glad you got it sorted)
Yup that looks a lot better 🙂
Thank you guys so very much!
Glad we could help 🙂
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