Google Page Speed issue after removing header banner image of Twenty Seventeen

The version that scores well was likely served from a page cache. It’s rare for WP pages to score that well without caching of some sort. Even if you don’t have caching enabled, your host could be doing so downstream. Once your page gets cached, it should perform well again. I’ve no idea what it would take for it to become cached again. Perhaps some number of requests without the original page being changed.

If your page is not being cached, all I can suggest is addressing what ever Page Speed suggests for improvement.

It seems to me that the Page Speed score isn’t so much based on raw page performance as things within the page it thinks can be improved. This explains how removing something decreases its performance score. The page may be fewer bytes and loads faster, but Page Speed sees room for improvement, so it scores poorly.

Hey bcworkz,

Thanks for responding back.

I did almost all the recommended things by Google Page Speed. The only thing left is the Optimize CSS Delivery for the style.css of the theme. The style.css file only has the commented code of the theme and doesn’t have any CSS code.

Also, if I use the cache plugin then it will affect the layout of the site which I created till now. I tried Autoptimize and w3 Total Cache plugin. These two plugins affected the layout of the site.

Is there any other way that I can achieve good score without affecting the site layout.

Waiting for your response.

Regards
Dev

If there is no functional CSS in a file, it should be dequeued so that it is not even loaded. Many plugins arbitrarily enqueue their styles and scripts on every page because they have no way of knowing when their resources might be needed. To optimize particular pages, dequeue any styles and scripts not needed on a particular page. This can be done by hooking “wp_enqueue_scripts” action with a very late priority. Check the return of get_queried_object_id() against an array of ID values which determine whether to dequeue the needless scripts and styles or not.

Most scripts can be enqueued in the footer. If they are not already in the footer, and are used on the page, try enqueuing in the footer. CSS that is solely for below the fold content can also be loaded in the footer. The fewer files loaded in head, the better. Where reasonable, converting external files to inline script or style will help.

Optimizing and caching plugins can be beneficial, but they are rarely plug and play. Their settings need to be tuned in order to get the most out of them without corrupting your pages.