How to optimize loading speed via theme?

  • Unknown's avatar
    herpsecology · Member ·

    I’ve spent the last few months doing everything I can to optimize my blog’s speed without changing the theme. That has included:

    A. Getting rid of as many widgets as possible
    B. Reducing the # of images
    C. Optimizing image size

    It’s been a ton of work, and as a result many of my pages are now much faster than they used to be. But the basic page speed is still “slow”, even on pages that don’t have images.

    Field Data: Over the last 30 days, the field data shows that this page has a Slow speed compared to other pages in the Chrome User Experience Report. We are showing the 90th percentile of FCP and the 95th percentile of FID.

    I went to the demo page for the theme, and it’s even slower than mine. So I thought, “maybe the theme itself is the problem?”

    These is what Google PageSpeed Insights says is making my home page slow:

    Eliminate render-blocking resources 0.9 s
    Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles. Learn more.

    Minify JavaScript 0.45 s
    Minifying JavaScript files can reduce payload sizes and script parse time. Learn more.

    Remove unused CSS 0.45 s
    Remove dead rules from stylesheets and defer the loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content to reduce unnecessary bytes consumed by network activity. Learn more.

    It also says:

    Minimize main-thread work 2.2 s
    Avoid chaining critical requests 16 chains found
    Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small 40 requests • 508 KB

    Can I improve on any of those things? How? Will changing the theme help?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi, can you confirm this is for the home page of bangkokherps.wordpress.com ? Are you trying to optimize that for SEO? I’m trying to figure out what you mean by “basic page speed.”

    Note we aren’t going to be able to *completely* optimize everything and keep all of the same functionality. And, on a free site you’re not going to be able to make change to themes at all.

    But if you aren’t really using the particular features, you could disable them — things like carousels and sharing buttons.

  • Unknown's avatar
    herpsecology · Member ·

    I’m hoping to improve page speed across the board on my blog. I often use the home page as a test page for that but I’m trying to make across-the-bard improvements.

    Yes, the primary reason I’m trying to improve page speed is to optimize for SEO. For whatever reason my SEO used to be incredible (I was the first result in many relevant searches) and is now pretty bad, hits are down to well under half what they used to be, and I’m not sure how that happened but it seems like the poor page speed could be a factor. My previous theme worked great for me but it “aged out” and stopped being supported and that led to multiple problems. Now my new theme is adequate visually and functionally but like I said, the page tests as very slow.

    Yes, I have disabled several things that weren’t important. If you see more to disable that would make a difference then I’m all ears.

    Here’s my question. Knowing that we can’t make changes to themes, can I pick a better, faster theme? How do I know which themes are fastest without having to try every one out (and perhaps messing up my site in the process)?

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    To confirm, is this in regards to bangkokherps.wordpress.com and the Rowliing theme? You could switch to a default theme just to check and see if the site speed improves. Let me know if that is the site you are referring to.

  • Unknown's avatar
    herpsecology · Member ·

    Yes, that is the correct site and theme.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    I don’t see any issues with loading speed on your site. The entire site loaded for me in under two seconds, which is very good.

    If it takes longer for you to load, then the problem is most likely local to your browser or related to your internet connection, rather than an issue with the theme – if the problem was with the theme, it would be slow for everyone.

    Can you check if using a different browser or a different internet connection makes any difference on your end?

  • Unknown's avatar
    herpsecology · Member ·

    It’s actually the Google PageSpeed function that has me concerned:

    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbangkokherps.wordpress.com%2F

    “Field Data – Over the last 30 days, the field data shows that this page has a Slow speed compared to other pages in the Chrome User Experience Report. We are showing the 90th percentile of FCP and the 95th percentile of FID.”

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Thanks for the link. Just to be clear, what you see on Google’s reports is not exactly speed, but some kind of algorithms that can not be always followed.
    As we mentioned previously, some CSS and JS has to be rendered at the head of the page, so that things would work correctly.

    If you see your site is not scoring high, it really is not an issue, but how some things work.

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