Not on mobile

@dyderik2 – Do you have a link?

Oh sorry. Website is https://cyberpositions.com

@dyderik2 – Your site appears to be responsive, but is not serving the site this way. You have a mobile only based site which is plain white. Generally these sites strip out all the footer content which would include our popups. After looking though your sites theme is responsive so disabling that mobile switcher may be the trick as your theme already would work on mobiles without it.

The chalkboard scales perfectly for small screens meaning you don’t need both a responsive theme and mobile switcher, they are basically the same thing.

Thanks Daniel. The chalkboard theme is responsive but scores very low speed in mobile. I tested it with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights This forced me to install a plugin that is able to detect mobile devices. If it does, it automatically switches to a fast loading mobile theme. I had to strip out the navigation and the footer of this theme to make it load faster and to make it display better on mobile. Is there any code in the theme that I should have left in tact to make the popup work in mobile, maybe?

Also noticed that there is an error in settings: The callback function used for the supported_taxonomies setting is missing.

@dyderik2 – What issues did pagespeed say existed? I find that 9/10 its large unoptimized images. Simply making smaller compressed versions for mobile often can make the world of difference.

For instance our site just got a major update, the 800x442px images we load for each extension only weigh in at ~2-4kb, super small compared to the old images that were ~140kb-300kb each and smaller. This purely came to method of saving and compression. Your chalkboard texture for instance can likely be saved as a png8 with a limited color pallete. Limit the colors to the smallest number possible without loss of quality in the image. The lower # of colors will drastically drop size.

Also my mobile speed is faster than my home connection :), I get 30mb on my cell and hotspot and most mobile users are over 10-12 so although mobile speed is something to consider its not neccesarily worth ripping up your site for.

Plugins like that are nearly extinct in favor of Responsive design. Even google recommends responsive over seperate designs to unify users experience between devices and simplify indexing of your site for search.

Your mobile will definately need to run wp_footer and wp_header. Not sure what else could cause them to stop loading except that they may be forcing all CSS & JS to be disabled from loading as well which would mean no Popups since they rely on JS.

Thanks Daniel and totally agree with you.

1) Where can I find the chalkboard texture? What is “texture”? I have no idea. And what is png8? Never heard of to be honest. And I suppose you are talking about image optimization?

2) Suppose number 1 fails. Then I would like to know how and where to “run” wp_footer and wp_header on the mobile theme?

Thanks again and sorry I respond so late!

I totally optimized everything on my desktop theme Classic ChalkBoard. However, its mobile speed in https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights remains very low. So I really have to use the mobile theme for mobile. Speed is excellent: 91. Desktop is 93. Never achieved such good results so I would be stupid if I removed the plugin WP Mobile Edition. I tried about 15 other mobile plugins and none of them can achieve this speed.
Then I deleted WP Mobile Edition, installed and activated again, changed nothing of the Mobile theme this time, left it 100% in its original state, and…..still no popup. This makes me think that there is really a weakness in Popup Maker.

@dyderik2 – Just tested it, works fine with PM in general testing. Did you enable wp_footer / wp_header under advanced settings on the Theme Settings tab?

Definitely not an issue with PM though. Just an fyi, in general those mobile switcher plugins get such great results by disabling as much as possible, this often includes reducing functionality to a minimum. After reading through their support forums( which they obviously don’t respond in very often ), there are numerous complaints of Plugin X or feature y of my site isn’t working. These are generally because of how much stripping down they do to get those results.

Just to let you know we have a 1080px hi def image and at least a dozen other images on our home page, which still scores a 61% overall without any optimizations. I simply haven’t had time to focus on it.

You should be able to get the popups working though.

Let me ask you this. What % of your traffic is mobile. TBH and no offense to you, just mho, when I visit a site that looks like the mobile version of your site, I almost immediately hit the back button as it just looks antiquated and old in general. Site speed can only do so much for you, but overall appearance will play a much larger part in the success and conversion rates of your mobile users.

General consensus is that a mobile only theme is mainly good for returning users, and that a well branded responsive theme that matches your site on desktop will greatly improve first time visitor return rates and branding recognition.

All of that said it really comes down to each sites own market and user base.

To answer some of your other questions. png8 is just a way of saving png images and limiting the colors saved with it. There are a lot of ways you simply arn’t doing yet that could reduce your sites load time without compromising its appearance.

Starting point total page size including images, css & js is 234kb.

We can greatly improve that.

Lets take for instance your header image. It weighs in at 52.7kb. Thats nearly 25% of the page size. Simply opening it in Photoshop and resaving it as a JPG on medium quality shows no noticeable difference in image quality or detail but reduces it to ~25.6kb less than half. Do the same to all of your images. This will save you ~60kb.

Now lets look at your CSS & JS. This is ~101kb of the page size. Using a plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total cache you can concat and minify these which will likely reduce their size to about 75% of what it is now. That may not sound like a huge savings, but what your not seeing is that instead of loading 12 seperate files for JS alone you would be loading 1 or 2 and 1 css file.

So now total page size would be down from 234kb to about 134kb.
Your # of requests would be down from 36 to 19.
Your mobile theme weighs in at 48kb and 13 requests.

The real takeaway here is that the parts that really slow your site down, arn’t large images and JS. Nearly all site slowness comes from multiple request limits. Meaning you could get very close in load time simply by reducing requests. Most browsers mobile included have a limit of 10 requests at a time. Each JS, CSS & Image file is 1 request. Page speed scores almost always indicate this as the main factor. reducing requests from 36 o 19 brings you very close to the mobile theme but maintaining a matching look to your desktop site. Also once you enable wp_header & wp_footer on the mobile theme the # will definately increase to at least 19+ since you will load not only PM JS & CSS but also that of any other plugin loading CSS & JS that has been stripped away.

Also after running pagespeed test on your site from various sources not just google, your biggest slowdown has nothing to do with the site size & # of requests, it is related to server response time. This is the time from first request til your server first responds with header info. This also has nothing to do with theme.

You could conceivably move your site to a faster server, reduce image sizes, implement a cacheing plugin and get the same score but with better appeal.

Anyways PM should work once you enable those advanced checkboxes, but this will also increase # of requests and page size as PM won’t be the only CSS & JS to load then.

Also we use EDD which I also see installed on your site and it will experience major breakages likely using the mobile theme. Some functionality may be compromised entirely. Though I didn’t test it thoroughly.

Wow – Daniel – that’s a long story! Thanks for your time! Question: where can I find wp_footer / wp_header under advanced settings on the Theme Settings tab? I checked PM and there are no advanced theme settings. I checked the mobile theme Unus and there are no advanced theme settings as well. Thanks again.

OK found it – clicked the check boxes plus saved and……popup is there! But you’re right – mobile theme is now much slower, alas!

@dyderik2 – Yea, now all of the JS & CSS they had optimized to do without will be loading again. Not just ours but anything that was their before.

As I was pointing out, your best bet is to optimize your images, install a good cache/minify plugin and use gzip compression. That will likely get you better end results.

Ok thanks for all the help Daniel!