[Deborah Savadra]

Deborah Savadra

August 5, 2021 at 6:27 am #3531386

I’ve contacted their support, but while I’m waiting, I wanted to see if anyone could suggest anything I need to look at from my end.

I implemented Project Lightspeed on 7/12. I noticed in Google Search console that my entire site was failing checks for CLS and LCP. Since I implemented it and prompted a new crawl, however, I’ve seen little to no improvement:

https://log-thrive-support.s3.amazonaws.com/core-web-vitals-desktop-8-5-2021.png

What do I need to be looking at?

[David Risley]

David Risley

August 5, 2021 at 6:27 am #3531389

I would run it through PageSpeed Insights:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Or GTMetrix.

Both of those will test in real time and they offer suggestions. Of course, those suggestions can be a little geeky sometimes, but can begin to point to what the issue is.

The Search Console is slow to update, so using that to debug anything would be difficult.

Project Lightspeed isn’t a miracle worker, by any means. Plus, keep in mind that it only applies to Thrive itself, not to anything else you might have on your site.

[Deborah Savadra]

Deborah Savadra

August 5, 2021 at 6:27 am #3531390

Thanks for that reply. Not being a “techie” is proving to be a real handicap … again.

This is the response I received from them:

Regarding the lightspeed, please note that this is not something that will increase your score by simply running the optimization. What Project Lightspeed does is optimize the code that our products write in order to be compliant with the new Web Core Vitals. Previously, our products were loading a big flat_css file that contained all possible elements , even those you were not using on the page. This was considered good practice as when a user visited the website, this big file was downloaded and saved in cache and the 2nd time the user would visit the website, it would load faster regardless if you added new elements to the page as the flat_css file contained any possibility already. Now, with the new Web Core Vitals announced by google, this is no longer good practice therefore we optimized the code to no longer load that big flat_css file and instead, load only the elements that you have on the page which is considerably lower in size and will no longer provide errors from our products in Google Page Speed insights such as “remove unused css” for example.

To sum this up, project lightspeed optimizes our code and no longer makes our code to cause bad scores, but there are many other factors that can decrease your score like hosting/the way you designed the page/animations/scripts/ads or html codes/unoptimized images and so on.

• I checked your website and the main drawback is the rendering of CSS and JS in the front-end [link to screencast] You can increase your score by using a caching plugin and minify JS and CSS.

Besides that you do not use anything for image optimization, please consider optimizing your images via a 3rd party plugin like Optimole or Smush.

All can be found and installed from from the site-speed section of Thrive Theme Builder : (caching plugin + image optimization)
https://help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/4426154-how-to-use-the-site-speed-section-of-the-thrive-theme-builder-dashboard

Besides that, the CLS on the homepage is caused by your page design and layout , as you can see, even when loading the editor the text and content is on the right side of the page while the page loads:[screencast]
This is caused by stretching elements to full width : [screencast]. While having this option active, the website will load the original size first and then stretch it to full width causing CLS. Please disable this and see if there are any improvements.

I would recommend checking Google Page Speed Insights and follow their advice there to improve your score. You can read more about how you can interpret the results here:
https://help.thrivethemes.com/en/articles/5396637-interpreting-the-site-speed-score-from-pagespeed-insights

Let us know if you have any further questions.

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Well, that’s an FML moment.

I thought “the rendering of CSS and JS in the front-end” was what Thrive was handling. If that’s not Thrive’s job, then what is the “front-end” and how do I have any control over it?

Also, if I remember correctly, WPEngine does all its caching at the server level and doesn’t allow third-party caching plugins. Am I wrong? Am I going to have to install my own caching in addition to WPEngine’s?

If I didn’t have students enrolled in courses, I’d take this thing offline and have it professionally re-done. As it is, I’m toying with the idea of experimenting with a non-Thrive theme on a staging site to see how complicated a switch away from Thrive would be. I think I’ve just overengineered the stupid thing over the years, and maybe I just need to go back to pre-Thrive simplicity.

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[Deborah Savadra]

Deborah Savadra

August 5, 2021 at 6:27 am #3531393

I’m sorry if the above sounds whiney, but as a non-technical person, I come away from a support response like that with feelings of overwhelm and confusion. Just ignore this entire thread. I’m sure I’ll figure out a workable solution eventually. Thanks again for the PageSpeed Insights suggestion.

[David Risley]

David Risley

August 5, 2021 at 6:27 am #3531396

Think of Thrive Themes just as a tool. What people make the tool do can go a number of different ways. Like a screwdriver, you could use it to screw in a screw, or as an ice pick, or as a weapon. Point is, it is just a tool. And what you build with the tool can have negative impact on those web vitals scores and you can’t blame the tool. There are just a lot of things that go into it.

Actually, their support response was proper. But, I understand it is greek to ya. 🙂

So, here’s the thing….

I ran your site homepage through GTMetrix and your scores aren’t that bad at all. You DO have a CLS (layout shift) score that is too high, but the rest of your numbers seem fine. When I was still using Theme Builder on my site, I had a similar situation and I could not figure out how to get that CLS number down. Switching themes alleviated the issue. Thrive Support was likely correct that going full-width on your layout is causing that because it will load, say, your background image of the keyboard and then expand it to cover the full screen. Which is a shift. The best way to get rid of any shift is to have things show up on screen in the exact size it is suppose to show up in the first place.

You may want to try getting rid of that keyboard image background and see if it helps the situation.

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