Works, but with a GOTCHA that made it useless for me

  • brainandconsciousness

    (@brainandconsciousness)


    2 years, 9 months ago

    I tried out this plugin because I had a large 1920-pixel wide beautiful header graphic on my website that I wanted to get resized for different screen resolutions to improve the site’s PageSpeed score. Unfortunately the plugin wouldn’t work to resize the image, and I struggled with it for days before finally seeking Support help. At first they told me it was working properly, but since it wasn’t ACTUALLY working properly I persisted and finally learned that they have a large ‘gotcha’ built into this plugin that they don’t normally tell you about: images are only resized for ‘lazy loaded’ images, and they don’t allow a site’s header image to be lazy loaded! GOTCHA! The plugin was useless for what I wanted it for!

    Your mileage may vary however; if you run a site serving up a large number of images, it might be just fine for your needs as long as you don’t care about running an unoptimized header image. The CDN works fine but didn’t improve my PageSpeed score, as I only had one or two other images besides the header graphic on the whole site, and they weren’t very large to start with. I’m a little wary of CDNs anyway because they introduce a ‘dependency’ into your website, meaning your site forever afterward will depend upon the CDN working properly in order for your own site to work well for your visitors, and you’re screwed if the CDN breaks or is attacked or goes out of business or gets sold to another outfit that then wants to charge you big bucks to continue using it. In theory a CDN is a good thing, but in practice does have those risks. That’s just my opinion though and I’m not faulting this plugin for using a CDN, because it did work fine for my site even though it did nothing to improve the PageSpeed, and I willingly introduced the plugin knowing it was creating a dependency.

    So I Deleted Optimole and sought some advice from a brilliant Aussie web developer who recommended that I should use the “Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster” plugin instead. Bingo, my PageSpeed now runs 99 or 100% for desktops and I’m happy. The mobile device score usually runs 93 to 95% and that’ll do too. Woo hoo I finally got a zippy WordPress site! I had almost given up hoping it was possible!

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  • Optimole will lazy load all images on a page if configured to do so, and it makes no distinction between ‘header’ and body images when it processes output sizing.

    It’s great that you found a solution that satisfies your need, but I think Optimole could have solved the issue too if the right settings had been applied ??

    AC

    (@purplecodes)

    Themeisle Support

    Hi @gpcola,

    You can actually disable the lazy loading feature for X number of images so it will be excluded in the lazy load. https://vertis.d.pr/3aAQTb

    Hope this helps.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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