Day & Half the Night trying to Fix Site Speed, But Not Everything is As it Seems

bySorayacge

1.5K followers

3 years ago

My Site Speed Project feels a bit like chasing my non-existent tail round in circles.

Trying to tackle the technical issue of improving site speed isn't as easy as it sounds. There's frustration lurking around every corner.

But the flip side of frustration is satisfaction! Which actually comes with every step forward! So next time you feel frustrated, remind yourself that sooner or later you will be rewarded with satisfaction.

It's worth it, even if it's a bit tedious, nail-biting, hair-tearing and downright SLOW.

When things sink into the domain of coding, I'm not confident enough to apply it. (Reminder to self: I must study more!)

So when it gets tricky, I have to search and search and search for other alternatives.

And did I mention search?

I came across what I believe must be an awesome plugin for this job - it's called Asset CleanUp and it identifies the different groups of coding on the site which you might want to remove.

Hahahaha yeah fine.

Delete unnecessary code - you know, just look at that code and you know it's completely unnecessary and it won't break the site, right?

Wrong! lol (for me)

There's no way I'm going to start deleting code, even from the staging site let alone the real site. . .

I'm pleased to announce that the staging site now has the happy Grade A result over on GTmetrix (from a previous grade B).

But Hang On, don't start jumping up and down just yet!

Google doesn't agree . . .

And you know the first rule of a blogger's life right?

What Google wants Google gets . . .

So here is Google's less enthusiastic report on the site speed (mobile). It's better than the 29 we started out with, but still some distance to go yet . . .

So you see, the journey continues . . .

If Google says the site is too slow, the site is too slow.

There are still unused JavaScript and Render-blocking 3rd party resources listed as red targets.

So the search isn't over, but at least there's some kind of progress to report.

This is all still on the staging site btw. And I probably WILL go ahead with the theme change, if I can eventually get this from red - orange - GREEN!

One thing I noticed is that there is Amazon ads code lurking in there (because when I started I thought I was going to make a killing as an Amazon affiliate ;-) ).

So maybe if there's a way to strip out that code, which might help to the speed-up project as my focus right now is on building traffic?

One way to strip out Amazon adverts coding from the site would be to upgrade to premium with Asset CleanUp but as yet I'm not sure that's right for me, given my uncertainty.

I want to thank all of you who have kindly commented on my speed-project to give me encouragement or help and a special shoutout and big thank you to @Richardgb for his very generous and continued help.

All encouragement feels like Sunshine in winter - very much appreciated!

Thank you for reading!

Have an awesome week,

Soraya