No and NO – Good bye Humming Bird

Hi @earthdye

I hope you are doing well today.

Thank you for the good and bad parts pointed out by you in this review. Allow me to refer to some of them, especially the bad ones in your opinion.

When it comes to your issues with Hummingbird, please note we improved and still improve things when it comes to this tool. It seems you mainly refer to Assets Optimization which can break the design site if that tool is not used correctly.
Each of our tools or features is covered in our docs (https://wpmudev.com/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/hummingbird/#asset-optimization) and our support is always ready to help to narrow down the main issue our members or users on this forum reports.

As a side note Assets Optimization now has an Automatic Mode option which is safer for less experienced users https://wpmudev.com/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/hummingbird/#assets-optimization
Manual Mode always required some knowledge about own site and used plugins.

With that Automated feature, which compresses and combines the assets, delay the JS and generates the Critical CSS, we have been also applying major compatibilities with the most popular plugins and themes, however, delaying a JS or using the manual mode can break the site in case it has a higher dependency on the JS files, example if we delay jQuery but another script depends on it, this isn’t a Hummingbird thing but happens with any delay JS method.

Please note there are over 60k plugins in the org repository and thousands of themes on the market. With that each of the sites which uses WP core is different. Following this we cannot know how theme and plugins authors design the core of JS and CSS files.

More experienced users will for sure know how things work and how to use our tool, but that does not mean we push less experienced on a side track and not help them. Like 60k plugins in the WP repository, there are thousands of examples of users who work in other industries (sellers, bloggers, writers) who still need WP core to handle their sites and plugins which can help to speed up them.

Another note is that the full assets optimization can take up to 40 minutes, however, in the latest update we split the Delay JS and Critical CSS queue from the Assets Optimization ( combine compress ) queue, in case any of them is breaking anything it would be visible faster than before.

Moving on with different plugin setups and themes, there is always the possibility that some sites will be faster or slower depending on how many of them you use on your site. If we mix that with another factor which is different hosting providers that offer different server resources things again can have a better or worse reflection on site speed (not only frontend but backend as well).

====

When it comes to the new feature we offer which is a paid service for site optimisation, there is nothing odd or bad in that. Let’s take another example which will be any other plugin in WP repositories, even the free ones, which do not offer Pro paid membership. As a free user in the WP repository, I install the plugin, check docs, and ask for help to solve issues if necessary. I do not ask to fully configure the plugin on my site, as this is my responsibility to get familiar with docs and configure plugin on my own. If I cannot handle that (let’s say I’m a blogger) I hire a developer to handle that. So why as a company we cannot offer such paid feature that is useful for such members? Also, having in mind that this service comes from the same people who make that plugin, why not hire them instead of 3rd party developers who use Hummingbird from time to time? I have to fully disagree with you in that matter and again there is nothing odd or bad in that offer.

Also, we have a lot of members, who run multiple websites and don’t have time to speed optimize new complex sites that’s why they hire us to do speed optimization. For the majority of sites enabling a few Automated Optimization options should be enough to get a high performance score. For more complex sites users may need to do extra configurations.

====

If you have any kind of issues with images, please note that Smush has 3 levels of compression in the paid version and it is recommended to test things on 1 image in the first place before BULK SMUSH thousands of images. As you possibly know Smush has also a feature to back up your images and any image that will be affected by compression can be reversed. In general, is it also a good practice to have any kind of backup plugin or backup service on your hosting.
I need to again disagree here with you as this is the user’s responsibility to get familiar with the documentation and functionality of the plugin.

====

As for Cloudflare, unfortunately, without a deeper check, we can’t know what happened there, as previously explained it is not an expected behavior, please email us at [email protected] in case you have any open tickets on our pro forums and we can verify what happened.

As for Semrush, similar as explained it is not possible to say what happened without checking, but in general when the CSS and JS are combined and compressed under the Hummingbird Assets Optimization, those codes still being from the plugins and themes but just under different URL.

Kind Regards,
Kris

Thanks for the response. Just the fact that I learned that HB is responsible for my slow propagating and slow backend is good reason not to use it. My site propagates almost instantly now, this is how it should be. Doing an update and then having to wait 45 minutes or longer, even after your cloudflare is cleared is not acceptable, I just thought it was wordpress. For most of us working and updating sites all day every day, time is money, not to mention waiting 30 seconds for the backend to load from product to plugins is enough to send your anxiety into a full blown anxiety attack. I pay a lot of money for the service which is more than worth it, however the final straw was the “hire us for 400.00” to optimize your humming bird ( maybe this is for folks not being hosted with WPMUDEV? Over the years the techs are phenomenal, but one thing is most of them lack experience with humming bird. So lets say you pay the 400.00 and get it working properly, that is only as good as the next update on other plugins and they you have to become a sleuth once again to figure it out, like you said, with thousands of plugins …. I do try and keep mine to a minimum, the ones I have I have to have. I highly recommend WPMUDEV, just not humming bird. Another thing is I was told to upgrade my back end years ago as it was so slow and it never made a difference. With HB removed it is 10x faster in the backend now. This also brings me to, isn’t cloudflare supposed to take care of all the speed issues, which is another service I pay for. Or maybe HB would work better without Cloudflare, but then with out a CDN, it would not be good. These are things we should not be worrying about.

Hello @earthdye

Thank you for your response.

When it comes to CDN, Hummingbird comes with a built-in CDN which is a Pro module, nevertheless, it also does integrate with Cloudflare, so ideally can be used with Cloudflare too.
Ref: https://wpmudev.com/docs/wpmu-dev-plugins/hummingbird/#cloudflare-integration

However, I understand your frustration but without a deeper investigation, we cannot really confirm why it happened. As mentioned previously, we would love to take a deeper look into the issue, if you can provide a staging site. Please get in touch with us at [email protected] so that we can take a closer look.

Kind Regards,
Saurabh

That does make sense if they do not have a hosting account they can pay to have it set up. I will check in again, at the moment I am setting up a new template, so my staging is occupied. However in the past using the staging site you cannot perform speed test, unless I was told the wrong information.

Once I am done with the new template I will be happy to let you guys give it a go again. I love you guys and I do know you have been working to make it better (among so many other things), I wont give up and hopefully can come back and update this review.