Optimising JS breaks a slider

Well, sliders in general can be a pain to optimize, esp. when focusing on “pagespeed insights” (which is just an attempt to quantify best practices being followed, I prefer to focus on KPI’s such as time to first byte and time to load instead).

but to answer your question;
1. you could try to tick the “also aggregate inline JS” option, this _might_ fix all your problems (but could lead to your cache size increasing too fast).
2. you could indeed do away with your slider or try finding one which is less dependent of javascript (jquery) being available early (see https://wp-rocket.me/blog/fastest-wordpress-image-slider-plugin/ for inspiration).

hope this helps,
frank

Thanks so much! That fixed the issue.

Just to follow up on using PSI, should I focus on improving the overall load time (Pingdom’s metric) rather than specific stuff Google complains about do you think? I was using it because they’re Google and so I thought they’d use those factors when ranking pages. My overall load time is OK for most pages (1-5 seconds) but I get like 55-70/100 for mobile on PSI, so I’m just wondering how much I should worry about render blocking Js and all that stuff.

Thanks!

google focuses on time rather then scores. 1-5s is not too bad, but I would try to move into the 1-3s fork if I were you (but I don’t know your website off course, maybe that’s hard to attain) ??