AO with Flywheel

the extent to which Autoptimze can improve performance depends a lot on the context (i.e. how fast was the site without AO) and AO’s settings. when looking at performance as measured by pagespeed, one should not look to the overall score, but rather focus on the specific KPI’s such as LCP, TBT, CLS and compare (averages of those running multiple tests ideally, as test results always fluctuate) how those evolve when using AO and tweaking settings and check the “opportunities” listed below those.

if you can share your site’s URL with AO active I’ll be happy to have a quick look and give some pointers of what can be done ??

hope this helps,
frank

Hi Frank, thanks for your answer.

Sure, my url is https://www.peanutsinwonderland.com ??

Many thanks!

OK, some pointers;
1. you have _a lot_ of 3rd party code (JavaScript) slowing your site down (as Pagespeed says; “Third-party code blocked the main thread for 7,260 ms”), consider removing some of those or replacing them by less performance-impacting alternatives
2. you seem not to using JavaScript optimization in Autoptimize, did it not work at all?
3. a lot of the images are Elementor background images and those are not lazyloaded (AO cannot “see” those and hence AO’s lazyload does not help). https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/lazy-load-background-images-for-elementor/ might help, but it seems not to be developer actively an more, so you might want to look into using Elementor elements that do _not_ rely on background images?
4. in Autoptimize the biggest gains can be found in ensure the CSS is not render-blocking; for that have a look at the “eliminate render-blocking CSS” option, but do take into account you’ll have to either;

a) generate & copy/paste the “above the fold CSS” in the field below (more info in the AO FAQ, look for “inline & defer CSS”) OR
b) create manual rules on the “critical CSS” tab (generating critical css for each rule) OR
c) take a subscription over at criticalcss and paste your API in the field on the critical CSS tab

hope this helps,
frank