[Resolved] Slow Websites

[Brian]

Hi,

I have been doing a bit of research over the last few days and wondering why a lot of the sites I do are slow. I have Autoptimize installed, I have started to route some of them through cloudflare and I have been thinking about amp. Is there anything else I can do? I notice that text doesn’t load until the relevent google font has loaded and so the whole process is slowed down. I have all plugins, themes and wp versions up to date. I also have tried updating to php 7.4 but found that it actually slowed down the site so I reverted back to 7.2. I have the mysql 5.7 (which is the latest version supported by my host.) What else can I do or am I missing? Do you recommend using amp on sites with generatepress, gp premium and generateblocks or is it necessary?

Kind Regards,

Brian Thompson

[Tom]

Hi there,

If you run your site through the following tool, it will give you tips on how to improve the performance: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

There’s quite a lot there to dig through, but the third-party code is definitely a part of the issue.

One thing GP related you can do is use SVG icons instead of Font Icons in Customize > General.

There’s also a lot of javascript loading on the page – it would be worth reducing that by disabling some features/plugins that aren’t 100% necessary.

It’s also worth considering that your server isn’t great, especially if upgrading PHP versions actually slowed things down. A fast server is the best thing you can do to get a fast website.

[Brian]

Hi Tom,

I had a look through some of the sites that were giving me trouble and implemented the changes you suggested by

1. Removing unnecessary plugins – I was using wordfence security which seems to have been slowing down a number of them. I also removed all the caching plugins bar one which is https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/ and turned on image optimization. This seems to have helped.
2. I have gone into customize > general and turned the dynamic caching for css on and switched from font to svg
3. I am using cloudflare now and I have caching turned on and have it optimised for speed and security as much as I can.

Thank you for all the help – it is much appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Brian Thompson

[Tom]

Awesome – no problem! 🙂

[mkjj]

Hi Brian,

may a ask what you mean by “slow”? GP is very fast. Lean sites built with GP usually load in under 0,7 seconds. I have Wordfence installed on all customer sites. With the live traffic option disabled it has no impact on performance.

[Author]

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