Site speed always attracts me a lot. Since I started my SEO journey, I have tried many things to get an ideal website speed.
For this, I have tried:
- CloudFlare
- Other CDN
- Premium DNS
- Many Plugins
- Coding!
- And a few more things.
But getting a perfect Page Speed Insight score for mobile always remained a nightmare.
Getting a good performance score over GTmetrix is easy; for most sites, setting up CloudFlare is enough for this.
But PGI is hard to handle!
A quick trick to get better PGI and site performance is to buy CloudFlare Pro package. Free plan only caches the desktop version, but pro plan will give you complete peace of mind.
CloudFlare Pro plan also offers SXGs, which is a kind of the next version of AMP.
I haven’t tried CloudFlare pro yet, but it is in my pipeline.
Now, the challenge was how to get a perfect PGI for mobile on a full working site without CloudFlare Pro!
Judgment Period:
For this, I study what page speed tools are saying about our site. For example, GTMetrix’s waterfall feature is amazing.
For further understandings, I used Asset CleanUp — WordPress Plugin. It amazed me to see the number of scripts running behind the scene!
Here are the major actions I took:
- Moved to GeneratPress from Genesis: Genesis is a great theme, but it gives mobiles a bad layout shift score.
- Removed Contact form + Jetpack: Contact forms run JS to work properly, but I found its JS is present on every site page. I have also seen some CSS of Jetpack on every page. Although I reinstalled Jetpack later for quick analytics only. 😀
- Removed Social Share Icons: These icons ran much CSS and a few heavy JS.
- Removed Google Fonts: It was a tough decision, but I did it. Now, the site is running on system fonts.
- Played with JS scripts
- A little more.
Then, here are the results.
GTMetrix Results:
PSI For Mobile:
I started the journey with PSI 45 score!
PGI For Desktop:
Still, there are slight changes I can make with CSS but satisfied till now. Will see it next time. 😉
Now, for new sites, I am focusing on these lessons from the start of the site to maintain perfect performance.
What FB Community Is Saying
Wanna share your journey? I am here to listen to.
