Try Try Again – and Yes, Autoptimize Improves Site Scores Big Time!

I’ve been playing with Autoptimize off and on for the past month. I came back to it today, and finally got everything working nicely.

I had some issues with an ajax pagination script for my WP-TYPES Toolset, but after excluding the script (wpv-ajax-pagination) everything is in working order.

My google page speed score has gone from an 84 to 93. I did fix a couple other things though, like rerunning my media library through EWWW (made some changes to how pngs are handled and got some nice savings), adding an expiry to the .htaccess files (Use WP Supercache and it does not add expires) like this (use your own expires bys..this is just an example);

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access 2 days”
</IfModule>
##End EXPIRES CACHING ##

Reinstalled the Use Google Libraries plugin…this did not change the page speed score…but I can see a marked difference on the front end.

I’m on a dedicated Apache Server with linux, Nginx, gzip and mod_rewrite enabled with 1tb connection.

The site is media heavy, with an average of 30 images per page/post, and pulls in 20 plus rss feeds from other websites. Pages are feature heavy, and I have 55 plugins operating on the site. In addition, due to the nature of the site, the left primary sidebar contains approx 18 images, with upwards of 28 active widgets.

The only places I can see room for improvement (due to the nature of the site) is as follows:

Autoptimize presents render blocking css in header – can this be fixed?
Autoptimize presents Javascript that is not being minified – can this be fixed?
If there were some way to optimize/sprite the social sharing plugin button pngs – (not sure this can be addressed)

All in all, not bad for this setup.

Regards,
Will