photos load in ages

thanks indeed

There are a number of factors which can pull your page speed down considerably like:

– Extensive use of plugins, which increases latency as they tend to load upfront with every HTTP request
– Installing plugins that are not properly maintained and do not have a considerable amount of active installs.
– Plugin compatibility with your version of WordPress.
– Images that are not optimized take longer time to load
– Not using caching (You can look at WP Total Cache plugin)
– Render blocking scripts, i.e. JavaScripts and/or CSS which prevent the actual content of a page to load before they themselves get loaded completely.

I would suggest you to test your site with Google page insight, which will tell you more about the areas what you can modify to pull up the speed.

My suggestion is:
– Minimize the use of plugins as far as possible
– Follow Google insight and use defer attributes wherever possible.
– Take a close look at your installed plugins – do they have unresolved issues?
– Installing Caching plugin might be helpful.

Hope this will give you some idea about how to start. Let me know if this helps!

Thank you.

Many thanks Subrata. Seems like I have some homework to do. I definitely will let you know as this is a must before going live.

Cheers.

Thank you for adding your excellent pointers here @subrataemfluence. ??

@imonlyhappywhenitravel: I recommend starting the pointer on optimising your images, as you mentioned that image-heavy pages are taking a while to load in particular.

Please do let us know if you have further questions.

Hi,
So I’ve been working to optimize my page, still needs to be improved. One thing I came across is “add expires headers”. Since accessing the files directly wasn’t recommended, I created a copy of the .htaccess and edited that for this but it doesn’t seem to take effect. Any further recommendations?
Also “optimize images” have improved up to 3 seconds but I still get “317.6KiB (18% reduction)” recommendation. I especially wanted some images to be with more quality and fitting the screen but I get a low grade for that. Total page size for that particular page is 2.09MB, is it still necessary to keep it minimum for the sake of drawing less attention from the audience with a better picture?
Thanks.

Hi again,
Update on the issue; I tried it also on the main .htaccess file itself too. So that leaves me with two questions:
1- can I .htaccess be in childtheme and overwrite the main one?
2- I added this, why couldn’t i get it work?
#BEGIN Expire Header
<FilesMatch “\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$”>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 month”
</FilesMatch>
#END Expire Header

The .htaccess file doesn’t need to be edited via a child theme, you can edit the main one without it being overridden. Remember to be extra cautious when making edits to this file, however.

I’m not in the best position to advice on edits to the .htaccess file. There’s a lot of good guides available online that you could check out or you could consider starting a thread on the general support forum.

I visited your site and it loaded relatively fast for me. Is it still loading slowly for you?

If you’re judging the speed based on the results given by Google’s PageSpeed tool then it’s worth bearing in mind that Google doesn’t really measure speed, but uses algorithms that can’t always be followed.

For example, “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” is one of the errors given by the PageSpeed tools. Some CSS and JavaScript has to be rendered at the head of the page so your site can work correctly. It really is not an issue, but how some things work.

If we take a look at Google’s own Blog: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.google%2F

We can see that their own scores are even lower. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean that the code they are using is bad or that the speed of the website is not great. The test is to help improve the load speeds of sites by giving some suggestions.

Hope that information is helpfuL!

Ok,perfect, thank you. What kind of files should I be editing in a child theme then? Any document regarding that?

The main page speed is not that bad,the ones with pictures is a bit slower (3-4 secs) which is higher than the ideal but you’re right, way better most similar minded websites’ (had done a similar check ?? ). This fix is one of the suggestions in pagespeed, gtmetrix,yes.

Thank you.

What kind of files should I be editing in a child theme then? Any document regarding that?

These are some good resources about making child themes:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Child_Themes
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/01/create-customize-wordpress-child-theme/

Thank you, will check that ??