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Improve score on Gtmetrix

Please help to get an A score in Gtmtrix. Currently, it is at C.

Wed, 2 Oct 2019 6:42:09
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Yannick

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for reaching out to us!

    I’ve just tested the site with GTMetrix and it’s currently giving A PageSpeed Score with 92% grade. I assume that you did some changes to the site meanwhile that resulted in that score.

    Do you need further assistance with the case then? If yes, let me know, please, what more could I help you with.

    Kind regards,
    Adam

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Yannick

    Thank you for response!

    I checked the site and if by preloader you mean the preloading option of the current theme then this is not really a case here. That kind of preloader doesn’t actually stop GTMetrix from loading the site, neither it’s causing it to load “less resources”. All it does is that it kind of “tricks” visitors visually while they are waiting for the site to load.

    In fact, it only adds up to side load. I’ve tested the site and some optimization changes on it, including at least 20-something GTMetrix performance test runs and I’m afraid this will be more complex than just setting up Hummingbird configuration.

    First of all, the site is very “heavy”. There’s currently 57 plugins active and lot of them are quite “heavy”/’resource hungry” plugins. There are also some “dynamic” elements that affect the case but I’ll get to it.

    So I would strongly recommend starting with something that might sound a bit strange but may alone give quite a nice performance boost: reviewing all the active plugins and “re-considering” again if they are really absolutely necessary. I’m not that familiar with the site to tell you exactly which ones you should check but there’s a good chance that some of them could be replaced with lighter alternatives and some with just simple custom codes. I suppose that there are also some that “add up something cool” but might not be necessary in tech- and marketing terms.

    I mentioned also that there are “dynamic elements” that affect the case. The point is that there are apparently features on site (one of them being most likely Sale Alert tool) that are causing internal ajax calls to be executed “all the time” which in turn prevents pages (where that happens) from being cached. And cache could also increase performance here a lot if it was actually working. So that’s something important as well.

    I also said that I run multiple GTMetrix tests on site – this showed that two important things:

    1) the performance is quite inconsistent and even without making any changes, there are “ups and downs” between tests from B to C and back

    2) the actual performance is not really relevant. The load time is very long and longer than the scores would suggest. So I wouldn’t care much about the score itself for now but rather how the site actually performs/loads

    That being said, I’ve also tested various Asset Optimization and cache settings and I even tried server-side cache that apparently is available – the Page Cache is getting broken most of the time (as explained above) and the server-side cache doesn’t seem to be caching site properly either (which might be caused by the very same reasons too) so that doesn’t really affect performance for now.

    Asset Optimization can be a great “booster” but it’s not really a “magic wand” and alone, in case like this, won’t do miracles, I’m afraid.

    So to sum it all up, here’s what I’d suggest to do, step by step:

    1) review these plugins as explained earlier and try to minimize their number as much as possible (of course I’m not saying “get rid of all of them” – the site must be working the way you want it to; I’m only suggesting going for a kind of “compromise” between “coolness” factor of the site and its performance)

    2) consider that Sale Alert and similar tools (like any “live chat” type of features) – if they do really help and are necessary or perhaps at least could be somehow moved to some “more distant/rarely used” pages.

    3) after that see in Hummingbird -> Page Cache if cache is getting build up (you would see number of cached pages – if it’s reasonably high, it’s good; also if you look into the page source in browser for any page, homepage especially, look for comment that says that it’s cached);

    If steps 1 + 2 or 1 +2 + 3 do give noticeable performance boost, we’re good and we could then also enable Asset Optimization back and try to further configure it. But if not then:

    4) it would be strongly recommended to upgrade hosting plan as the current one would clearly be not enough for the site

    After that all we could also try to configure Asset Optimization to “squeeze” every last “bit of speed” from the site – but that should be on top of that all.

    Kind regards,
    Adam