ok, back ??
on the speed question; I ran multiple tests with and without AO (that good old ?ao_noptimize=1
trick) on the sublime https://webpagetest.org/ site. the results for “load time” are somewhat unclear, sometimes the pages with AO are faster, sometimes speed is (almost) the same, sometimes AO is (a bit) slower (you’re on HTTP/2, which explains why your site is not suffering that much from not optimizing).
test results with AO:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_8B_1GYK/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_68_1HEY/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_D1_1H2M/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_SF_1H10/
test results without AO:
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_Q5_1H82/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_AN_1GZQ/
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170316_Q5_1H82/
BUT … there are actually multiple “times” to take into account:
* time to first byte
* time to start render
* time to load (= “load time”)
* time to visually complete
* time to fully loaded
* time to interactive
and the tests with AO are consistently faster on most of those actually.
this is confirmed by one other important webpagetest metric, the “speed index” (more info here) and the tests with AO yield a speed-index of 6000+ vs the ones without AO that are 7000+
so based on this data, I can only conclude your site is faster with Autoptimize …
now that problem on your product-pages; I’ll have a look, but you’ll have to re-enable AO :-p