HUGE Website Speed Up And Improvement For Mobile!

bykevinzshan

647 followers

Updated 5 years ago

Hi everyone, today I have great news!

If you have read my most recent post, "A Full Website Redesign Incoming - Slow Website?", you'll know that I am working on improving and optimizing my website.

Right after I made the post, I started working on my redesign and completed step 1 of the process. I changed my theme, deleted majority of the ads, and removed some plugins.

The improvements were huge!

Here are the before and after pics:

Before:

After:

This was an awesome improvement. I not only sped up my mobile site by a lot, but I improved the desktop version as well.

The more interesting thing will be how did I accomplish this and what specifically helped.

Let me get into some more of the details.

The Process

So what did I do to improve my website speeds?

1. Delete All The Ads Except For One Sidebar Ad

This got rid of a lot of Javascript requests that were coming from my website and thus, made my website a little faster. Plus it also made my website look less spammy and unprofessional.

I left one ad in the sidebar as it isn't in the way much and I still want my site to be monetized by Adsense (Amazon is low-converting for a huge part of my traffic).

How much did this help?

Quite a bit. Unfortunately I didn't take screenshots of my page speed insights after deleting the ads, but I did run a few tests.

The tests themselves did not show as much of an improvement with increments of 5-10 on the occasional blog posts, most actually stayed the same.

But when my brother opened up my website on his phone, he said that it was a lot faster and better now. The main benefit of this change was probably the clearing up of my website.

2. Change My Theme

The next step I implemented was changing the theme.

My site now runs on the free GeneratePress WordPress theme.

Although there are many talking about how good it is, I wasn't particularly impressed.

The speed didn't increase much and I actually prefer the the Hiero design of my website. Perhaps that's because I've been using Hiero for so long.

Anyways, whatever designs I'm unhappy with, I will fix in a future step of my plan (Step 3 and 4) and for now, it's all about actually getting people to my website and reading it.

3. Deleting Plugins

The biggest change I must say, came from deleting plugins. There was actually one specific plugin that was causing a lot of slow speeds on my site.

Here's my list of plugins and what was removed:

• All-In-One SEO Pack
• WP Product Review Lite
• Classic Editor
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• Insert Headers and Footers
• WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post (Removed)
• Official Facebook Pixel (Removed)
• Ultimate Social Media Icons (Removed)

The All-In-One SEO Pack, Classic Editor, and EWWW Image Optimizer are things that came pre-installed. They have never caused me any trouble and I find them quite useful. So I kept them!

Now for the other two plugins I kept.

WP Product Review Lite was really bringing value to my site. It gave me a better call to action and good way to summarize everything at the bottom of my page for my reviews. Plus my reviews on Google now have star ratings in the snippets.

Insert Headers and Footers is used to contain my Amazon OneLink code (used to also have my Auto-ads code but I deleted it) and I don't want to mess around with my website's code just yet, so I'm keeping this one for now.

Now that I have hindsight, the plugins above are really not affecting my website speed much and in the case of the EWWW Image Optimizer, actually improving website speeds.

What did I delete, though and how did those plugins affect my speed?

The first plugin I removed was the Official Facebook Pixel. I wasn't running any Facebook ads and felt that there was no need.

The plugin itself had low ratings and it was untested with my WordPress version. If I ever need to install a Facebook pixel in the future, I will do that but for now, it's gone!

Deleting it didn't do anything, though. My website was still pretty darn slow.

Next was the WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post plugin.

I first installed this when I was playing around with Woorank and I thought that redirecting my http site to my https site would make a huge difference in SEO.

When this plugin was first installed, it did that and my SEO scores on Woorank went up. But for some reason, when I checked it again later on, it stopped working.

Well then let's get rid of this plugin. If I ever want to play around with redirects, I'll do that some other time.

Again this deleting this plugin didn't help much.

So now, we finally figured out the culprit. The Ultimate Social Media Icons plugin.

At first I was highly skeptical of deleting it. The plugin itself looked pretty clean. 5 star reviews, a million installations, and constantly updated.

I thought I needed it too. One of the lessons learned in the OEC is to have easy ways to share to social media on my website. This was the plugin doing that for me.

I really had to ask myself, what was more important right now?

Of course, that would have to be the speed of my mobile site. Social sharing is important and all, but it won't matter if nobody reads my content in the first place.

I decided finally that getting rid of it would be the best idea.

I removed that plugin and boom, suddenly my page scores all increased to above 70!

Something I learned was that the plugin itself was too bulky. It had all these features that I didn't necessarily need.

Things like animation for the social media icons, a bunch of different types of social media icons, and other things were all eye-candy and things that didn't necessarily provide value to my website.

I am thinking of better and more lightweight ways of incorporating social sharing into my website, but we will leave it out for now.

So for everyone reading this, I highly recommend you go through all your plugins and think about whether or not you really need some of the plugins.

Think if you really need all of the features or if there was a better way to accomplish what you need and experiment!

The first step of my 5 step plan has been complete and things are already looking a lot better.

I am open to recommendations of plugins for social media sharing so if you have any, leave them in the comment section down below.

What Else Could I Do?

As you can see, my mobile scores are not perfect yet. Getting to that elusive 90-100 pagespeed rank is still a goal of mine.

The biggest culprit coming to mind is pictures.

On desktop, my pictures look totally fine and sometimes I feel like I even have too little. But on mobile devices, it's a whole other story.

I do believe some of the pictures are too big. I once checked some of my posts on my phone, and it looked like this.

Th

is

an e

xam

ple.

Of

wha

t wa

s ha

ppen

ing.

The picture was taking way too long to load because of how big it appeared and most of all, my content was completely unreadable!

But if I scale down all my images, suddenly the images are too small on the desktop site and don't provide any value to my readers.

What I want to be able to do is adjust the images for my desktop and mobile site separately. I believe this will help me a lot with my website speed.

However, I don't quite know how to do that yet. If anyone knows, I would definitely appreciate the help!

Another option is to make some of the larger images on the mobile site hidden and only open up in a separate tab or window if the reader decides to click on it.

It would completely get rid of loading times for the image, but unfortunately I do not know what's the best way to do this either.

Either way, it will definitely be something to look at in the future.

For now, I'm moving onto improving my content!

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments please leave them down below.

P.S. I might include another update after a few days or weeks to really see if my bounce rate has lowered. That was the main problem my 5 step plan was supposed to target.