Hi @carolinet24
I hope you’re well today and thank you for your questions!
As for the initial issue:
The initial conflict was most likely due to lazy load, as you suspected. Note though that W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin so even if you disabled the lazy load in one of the plugins, the changes that happened on site may have been cached still (for example, JS scripts related to lazy loading may have been loaded due to caching). I can’t say for sure if the issue is not happening anymore but that’s the most common thing in similar cases.
You should also make sure that e.g. theme or other plugin is not adding lazy load at the same time and, when using any kind of caching plugin, you should be aware of the hosting caching policy: some hosts would also by default add some kind of cache on a server level and, depending on what cache is that and how it is configured it may either need some sort of additional integration with the site or simply not play well with popular caching plugins. This is something you should actually consult with your host.
As for general performance in context of Smush
Note please that image optimization is not the only factor that affects performance and PageSpeed score. A good performance/score is always a sum/combination of multiple aspects of site’s configuration, design, server performance and so on. Optimizing images sometimes may be that one “deciding” factor but usually it’s one of many smaller elements of the big puzzle.
If it comes to Smush itself:
– you mentioned running images through TinyPNG but I’m not sure why doing that – did you use bulk-smushing option before that?
– what other options/configuration settings did you set in Smush?
Let us know, please.
If it comes to general performance/score:
I’ve allowed myself running a PageSpeed test on your site.
For desktop the score/results are really good. I’m currently getting score at 93 which is fine and while could possibly be improved, it doesn’t really require attention – it’s perfectly fine and good score.
For mobile it’s much lower indeed – currently at 42 for me. But more importantly, results show what are the most important issues here: the First Contentful Paint is at 3.1 second, Largest Contentful Paint at 6.2 seconds and Total Blocking time at 1800ms (18 seconds which is extremely long).
A look at the “Diagnostics” section below shows that while there are some issues related to images, there are also other things that must be sorted. I’d strongly suggest looking into ways to deal with JS optimization and addressing that “render blocking” time. I see you’re using Elementor so start with making sure to set its own built-in performance related options which you will find on “Elementor -> Settings -> Advanced” and “Elementor -> Settings -> Features” pages.
This alone can help a lot. If you are still using W3 Total Cache you may need to also work on fine-tuning its configuration. Note please that every site is different and merely enabling plugin and its cache option is rarely a good solution. Usually it takes a bit more to configure all the (and they are pretty complex in this plugin) settings to make them work well with the specific site.
You would also need to look into the main header in mobile version as this is reported as causing the LCP delay.
—–
With that being said I totally understand that you expected Smush to skyrocket the score but I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Performance optimization is always a sum of multiple things and only optimizing images or only enabling cache is rarely sufficient. A look at the PageSpeed test shows that there’s way more to be done there than solely image optimization.
Kind regards,
Adam
