Website Optimization for Core Web Vitals
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Hello
I just read Davids helpful post: https://www.blogmarketingacademy.com/core-web-vitals-seo/?__s=ggfhpyvrzsqnnq1kds9m
There are still some questions left about making my website as fast as possible:
– Can I just use the inbuild Image Compression of Thrive Legacy Themes or should I better use something like ShortPixel? I gues it has more features and therefore even better performance, right?
– What about Light Speed Project oft Thrive Themes? Should I use it, or better not? What’s the difference to perfmatters and could/should I run both or only one of them?
– Does it make my website much faster, when I use CDN, like for example Cloudflare?
– My host is wpengine. Did anyone find out, that Core Web Vitals or SEO got better, just by moving to another host? I guess if so, this isn’t much difference?Thanks for any help.
Kind Regards
Daniel -
– ShortPixel is way better. Purpose-built to the goal. Also, Thrive’s legacy themes are pretty outdated now, anyway.
– Project Lightspeed only affects Thrive and isn’t a full performance solution. All it does is makes some tweaks to the way Thrive resources are loaded. So, you could (and probably should) still use something like PerfMatters.
– CDNs can definitely make the site faster, but it is only one of many things. What the CDN will do is offload images and static files. That will decrease load on your web host (making things faster).
– WPEngine has a CDN, so you probably wouldn’t need Cloudflare’s. Can still use Cloudflare for DNS, though.
– Hosting matters a lot for web vitals. But, whether WPEngine would be an improvement or not really depends on what was used before. 🙂
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Hello David
Thank you very much for your helpful answer. I think I now quite fine, what to do and I’m working on it.
Some new questions just came up:
– I use wpengine right now. Do you think/know, another host would be much faster concerning loading times/server…?
I’m quite sure, I don’t have to change the host, to get good enough Core Web Vitals, right?
– I realized, that Google don’t like Popups. So I guess, I should get rid of them (have a lot…). Do you have any experience, if conversion rates of lead magnets decrease much (or even don’t decrease?!), when disabling pop ups and using static elements for lead magnets like sidebar, announcement box and so on..?And yes I know legacy themes are outdated. But I still didn’t find some time, to make the change. Overwhelm, you know… 😉 But I will find time during the next 10 years… 🙂
Kind Regards
Daniel -
If you’re happy with WPEngine, they should be fine. I think they’re overpriced, but they’re a good host overall. Unless you’re running a full blown membership site and need more horsepower without all the caching, I see no immediate need to switch.
As for popups, it is usually more of an issue on mobile. If you exempt mobile from the popups, you’re usually fine. That said, conversion rates on popups are not necessarily higher. They’re so common now that people are blind to it and instinctually close them. The call to action and hook is way more important to conversions than popup vs non-popup.
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Thanks for your reply, David.
I just installed ShortPixel Image Optimizer and that made the page loading much faster. Than I also installed ShortPixel Adaptive Images, but this lead to worse results in GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights. I guess there are some settings not set up ideal. Do I really need Adaptive Images as well? Which Tools of ShortPixel do you use and recommend to use?
And is this actually no problem/disadvanteg to have pictures loaded from a “foreign” CDN of ShortPixel?
I could as well compress pictures and then save right on my hosts server and use something like Cloudflare CDN. Then everything would be loaded from the same place. Isn’t that better?
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The worse things with ShortPixel Adaptive Images was especially about Performance and LCP. Performance was only about 50% (GTmetrix), without Adaptive Images it was about 85%. LCP was about 3.6s, without Adaptive Images it was about 1.2s.
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That’s a little surprising about Adaptive Images. I do use that one, too. Not even sure why it would slow things down much seeing as the resizing takes place on their servers, not your’s. You may want to contact them about that and I’d be curious what they say. 🙂
And no, it is no problem loading images from their CDN. One CDN is as good as another, in most cases. Whether you’re using WPEngine’s, ShortPixel, or Cloudflare, you’re getting the same job done.
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BTW, you can totally just work without Adaptive Images, too. I would say that plugin is more important for people who keep uploading huge photos. But, if you’re somewhat responsible about the image sizes you put on the site to begin with, you probably don’t need it.
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Thanks David.
So, do you use both Plugins from ShortPixel: Adaptive Images and Image Optimizer?
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I do, yes.
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In between I went through the whole optimization process and tada, my website went from red to green Web Core Vitals. Great! 🙂
But there is still an issue. I switched lazy load of youtube thumbnails on in Perfmatters. Now the thing is, that it’s necessary to cklick twice on the video, to get it started. You can see it here:
https://www.freiklavierspielen.com/diese-akkorde-klingen-einfach-beeindruckend-stufe-b6-stufe-b7/Perfmatters Support couldn’t help me so far and I saw, that here on blogmarketingacademy, this seems to work nice. Videos in the blog have thumbnails but start on the first click.
How did you get that work?
Or could this be an issue of different local laws about personal data?Best Regards
Daniel -
I use Elementor Ultimate Add-ons for that, and specifically the widget from that that allows me to use a Youtube embed but load it on click… and the image used is loaded locally from the post feature image.
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Thanks for your reply, David.
So don’t you use Thrive Themes anymore?
Since I’m using Thrive Themes and Thrive Architect, I need another solution. Do you just now about a plugin that could do that, when using Thrive Themes?Thrive Themes says, that if there is an extra thumbnail on youtube videos, it’s necessary to make the video itself autoplay. But autoplay is in Chrome only allowed muted or with this two click behavior. Both is not very user friendly in my eyes…
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Another question:
I’m cleaning up my media library in wordpress. I have as well many images, I don’t uses anymore on my website, so I could delete them. But the thing is, I don’t know which ones I still use, and which ones I don’t use any more.
I’ve searched for a plugin to help me with this, but couldn’t find anything. Does anyone know such a plugin?
Thanks, Daniel
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I am not using Thrive Themes on this site anymore, no. I still use it often on other sites, though. Still a fan. 🙂
Only other plugin you might want to check out is Presto Player. Perhaps it can help you. Other than that, you’ve named all the plugins I’ve personally tested when it comes to those video embeds.
I don’t have any plugin recommendation on the image issue. But, you could always just run a search for the image filename. Use a search/replace plugin, for instance. Just don’t use the replace functionality. Search for the filename and, if it doesn’t come up anywhere, you’re probably safe to delete it.
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