PageSpeedInsights
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Hey David,
Thanks for your earlier messaging about the new Google Page Insights. I have been using it extensively and found that ThriveThemes give very bad scores: try https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthrivethemes.com%2F&tab=desktop for example.
What is the experience of Thrive Themes users with their own sites? Their site response is quite low but that’s down to the hosting platform. But things like image height and width not being set needlesly slows down page layout time, and it’s the sort of thing I’d expect ThriveThemes to do for us, TBH.
– M
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Thrive Themes, like any visual theme and page builder, adds some extra overhead. But, on top of that, it depends on what you build with it – and a lot of other factors. I think Thrive Themes used to host with WPX Hosting, but not sure if they are still there.
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Hi Mark
I’m also using Thrive Themes which I love. But when I’ve been looking at the Core Web Vitals there is definitely an issue. The biggest problem I’ve found is the featured image – I have my site designed where I have a large featured image at the top of each blog post. In experimenting, when I remove the featured image element the page load is quicker. I’m going to change my blog post page template accordingly. Such a shame as I love the featured image at the top of the page.
Another bit of advice I came across is to keep the home page really simple so I’m also redesigning that.
My current host is SiteGround. I reached out to them to see what they were doing in anticipation of the changes coming in. The response I got back was disappointing. They advised that all their caching etc works fine. I changed my image compression to ShortPixel and saw a dramatic improvement.
I’m still going through a lot of experimentation – it seems that there is a lot to try and cover!
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You shouldn’t have to remove the feature image. That sounds like an image optimization issue to me. Also, you can use a CDN and offload images.
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You don’t need to turn off your featured image. Similar to what David and Jason suggested, optimize your images ahead of time and if possible use a CDN to speed up delivery of the images.
For example, what I use currently is:
- Optimize all images through TinyJPG – if you click through to the Developer API page then you can setup a developer key that will process 500 images for free per month, then it’s just under a penny per image for the next 9500 images, then it’s a fifth of a cent per image for anything over 10k compressions. You can do it automatically every time you upload an image to WordPress (both PNG and JPG) using the “Compress JPEG & PNG images” plugin and combined with your developer key for TinyJPG.
- Using that plugin in step 1, you can do a bulk optimization of your entire media library at once (well, depending on how many images it is, it might take a few hours.) You can also setup your settings to optimize asynchronously or as you upload images (note that if it’s in real time, then image uploads do take a few seconds longer than normal.) Do be aware that depending on your theme, you will have multiple sizes of each image to get optimized, anywhere from 3 to 8 or even 12 or more.
- I use the CloudFlare CDN, which on the free level provides caching on their edge network for all my images. They just announced last week a new beta program that will actually handle all of the optimization and delivery for you. (Not sure on pricing as they don’t seem to have shared that yet.) They also have a couple of existing products (Polish and Mirage) that will optimize which image is served to individual customers based on connection speed and screen size (including returning a webp version of the image instead), and optimizing for mobile devices. Those features require a paid plan, however (starting at $20/mo.)
- I am not currently using it, but discovered Bunny.net through Rob’s post and I expect I’ll definitely be switching over to them from Vimeo for a new site I’m going to be creating this Fall, but it looks like they have a service similar to what CloudFlare is offering for $9.50/mo. I haven’t used them yet and I really like CloudFlare so not sure if I’ll switch my CDN over at this point since I’m not too familiar with them yet and CloudFlare offers a lot of other services I use, but their video streaming service is about a third of the cost of the similar Service CloudFlare offers and a fraction of what a Vimeo Pro plan costs.
So…basically what David and Jason suggested, just with the tools I use listed, haha.
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Three quick suggestions based on actions I have performed recently:
1) Run all your images through Imagify (or similar) to reduce the file size significantly without losing quality.
2) Set up an AWS (Amazon Web Services) account and then use WP Offload Media to move all media from the local server to the cloud. I hired a guy on Fiverr to help set up the AWS side.
3) Use a plugin like Freesoul Deactivate Plugin (I think David recommended that a couple of years back). Not every page needs every plugin, so switch off anything you don’t need.
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Hi all – Thank you all so much for your input and guidance.
@Blaine I’m not very technical, so when you talk about optimising images off-page – do you mean running them through an external check first before uploading?
I will have a look at Bunny.net as well.
Really appreciate you guys taking the time
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I mean optimizing them before the visitor arrives, so for example, if you use the service I use (tinyjpg.com) you could either manually upload the file to their site, download the optimized version, then upload that to your site, or (and this is what I do) you could install a plugin that uses their service (which requires signing up for a developer API key but once signed up you just paste that into the settings and it does everything for you) – then all you need to do is upload an image to WordPress and it will automatically optimize it for you.
You can also use that plugin to optimize your entire media library of images that you’ve already uploaded to your site.
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ThriveThemes have released their Project LightSpeed upgrades and it is seriously much faster. The guys at Thrive have really responded to the challenge.
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