Archived topic
Slow Websites
4 replies · Started by Brian on March 13, 2021
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
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.
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
Awesome - no problem! :)
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.
