Fernus

Hi TellStevens did you manage to get this issue resolved eventually or just continued with errors showing at the back end?

The issue seems to be quite widespread when you Google it. As per your last post I’m experiencing the same kind of behaviour even though the original images uploaded and are not causing errors are jpg files too.

Thanks,

Shane

Hi,

I entered our Google Analytics ID into the corresponding field in the General Settings tab of the plugin but I found a couple of weeks or so later the plugin wasn’t implementing the proper tracking code to every page correctly. Google Analytics team told me the code didn’t look right. I had to disable this function of the plugin and instead used another plugin dedicated to tracking codes to save me manually inserting the code to a whole heap of pages.

Was this issue unique to me or have others experienced this? But it makes me wonder now how do I know the sitemap files I submitted to the Search Console are also accurate or whether the plugin in general in aiding my rankings or hindering the site?

Hi Frank,

Just to let you know time to first byte can vary wildly from B to F on webpagetest and perhaps by around 10-20 points on PageSpeed with differing severity of reduce server response time. I am putting this down to having a shared hosting account because late at night, when presumably other clients on the shared server aren’t experiencing high volumes of traffic themselves hence permitting more of the server’s resources to myself that I seem to achieve the best scores in the benchmarks!

If this is the case do you think it would be better to change hosts to a VPS plan with a company that are very local to me who use standard discs or with a company still in the same country as me but with their servers perhaps 100 miles from me but use faster SSD drives? This of course assumes all else being equal, such as service, uptime, etc. Also worth noting that the business’s client catchment area is not inter/national just local/regional.

Thanks

Oh my, this shouldn’t be happening!

Thanks for pointing this out to me, you’re a top guy!

Hi Frank,

I can’t see this. Can you tell me which benchmark you’re using to see this info so I can take the required action?

Thanks

No worries, thanks for looking into the issue for me though. Really appreciate it. What do you mean by this though:

regarding “leverage browser caching”; this only is a problem for the images that are explicitely fetched from the biothecare-site on the IP-address. try uploading those images on rejuvenatesclinic instead

As I interpret the leverage browswer caching issue from said benchmarks only Google Maps and the Facebook feed are coming in from external sources everything else is loading from rejuvenateskinclinic, is it not??

Hi Frank,

Thanks for offering. I have configured Autoptimize to deliver the optimised files dynamically by unticking the last box in the settings. Wordfence Falcon is on, web address is rejuvenateskinclinic.com.

Appreciate this a lot, thanks,

Shane

image compression surely will help, but won’t improve the base page TTFB. once your page is in cache, your site should fly, really. is the TTFB of the other requests also high? do you see the same issue when selecting another test-location (one near to where the serer is)?

True re image compression, but I’m out of ideas how to improve TTFB. Wordfence’s Falcon engine occasionally lifts the grade to a D whereas Fastest Cache drops it to a consistent F but increases the Yslow score in GTmetrix by a point or two over Falcon. The only other thing I can think of to aid the issue is to upgrade the hosting package but I can’t really afford that right now.

Don’t know if this sounds daft but once you’ve activated a caching engine how to do you ensure the page is in cache? TTFB of all pages that I’ve tested on the site seems to be lowly D’s or F’s if that’s what you’re asking? When you question whether I see the same issue when selecting another test-location do you mean if I see the same scores if I run the benchmarks from another PC? In terms of being nearer to the server that’s apparently based in the Netherlands!

even for the autoptimized .php-files? that’s very weird.

I’m not sure, I’m not knowledgeable enough to answer that yet! What I do know is PageSpeed keeps telling me and so does WebPagetest with its D (69%) score. PNG files mainly in the header seem to be the culprit for the lacklustre leverage browser caching score if that helps?

Shane

Hi Frank and AJ,

Apologies for the delay in responding, I’ve since not managed as much work as I’d have liked but there have been a couple of bereavements over the last few days.

Frank: The first letter indicates your time to first byte is high. If this is for pages that weren’t in Wordfence’s Falcon cache yet, then that’s understandable, but if this persist after the first load (I usually have webpagetest do 5 runs and focus on the median result) then you might have to look into Falcon’s settings (or consider an alternative).

As per your suggestions Frank, I have attempted to address the first grade of the Web Page Performance Test, sometimes a D and other times an F with the Wordfence Falcon Engine. As settings are very limited with this caching engine I deactivated that part of it and instead tried experimenting with WP Fastest Cache which really only increased Yslow scores in gtmetrix by a couple of points but returned consistent F scores for the first letter in Web Page Performance Test. I will try one more caching engine tomorrow but I suspect tangible improvements to loading times and benchmark scores are going to come from lossy compression of images in carousels. There are other uncompressed png images used but I don’t know how to access them and they are not stored in the media library.

Frank: If this is the case for Autoptimized CSS/JS, you could switch to dynamic files to deliver the autoptimized files (last option on settings page), this will help take care of compression & expiry of those files.

I tried this unfortunately the leverage browser caching issues remain. However, I must say I have greater respect for your Autoptimizer plugin. Fastest Cache have their own minification tools and with them activated and your plugin not in use it couldn’t touch the performance achieved by yours in GTmetrix and PageSpeed.

AJ, I understand what you’re saying so now use PageSpeed, GTmetrix and Web Page Performance Test.

Hi AJ,

Thanks for explaining that, I suspect my original perception is perhaps shared by many others so hopefully others will read this thread and help to educate them too.

That Web Page Performance Test is really good by the way! Does a damn sight better job than PageSpeed to show where the website is lacking not that I’m entirely sure how to fix the problems but hey.

Having picked 3 pages at random with grades of DAAFD, FAAFD and DAAFF shows just how much more tuning is required. ??

What I find confusing is that I have updated the .htaccess file to take of leverage browser caching and yet this stubbornly continues to be suggested by various benchmarks.

Thanks again for your sharing your knowledge.

Hi AJ,

That is true but if PageSpeed is a tool Google is using when considering where to rank me for SEO purposes then it makes sense to perform well in it.

I take my comments back. After more benchmarking I’m barely seeing any difference in scores between no performance enhancements, basic caching and with the Falcon Engine for the home page but on other pages PageSpeed scores improve by 23 and 25 points for mobile and desktop respectively!

Thanks for the replies Frank and AJ.

Having read various posts and blogs about not running two or more plugins together which cover similar objectives I was initially worried about the consequences of experimenting but a few days ago I read Frank’s responses to reviews left previously encouraging trial and error of the settings available.

Over the last couple of days I am finding for our website basic settings work best and PageSpeed scores for the home page improved from 43 mobile and 63 desktop to 48 and 71 respectively this is also with the assistance of Wordfence’s falcon engine. The performance difference is even greater for many of the other pages.

Thanks for explaining why Autoptimize is superior to similar features offered by CloudFlare. I was lead to believe up until now the fewer plugins the better, I guess this is an exception to the rule! To be honest, I’ve not bothered comparing benchmarks between this plugin and CloudFlare because the latter have pee’d me off with the setup issues I experienced and there lack of reply when I needed help.

I downloaded this plugin and also had the same query but when I was configuring CloudFlare I noticed they also offer Javascript, CSS and HTML minifying and Rocket Loader to help run JavaScripts files faster. With all due respect does this then make this plugin redundant for websites using CloudFlare with one less plugin to run?

Hi Roddyrick,

As you may already know the Custom CSS plugin once installed comes blank. So in my case I won’t find:

.site-header {
margin-bottom: 60px;
}

So I interpreted atrain300’s instructions as the above coding may well be present in the theme’s style.css but that I could over ride it by dumping the latter code atrain300 suggested

.site-header {
margin-bottom: 36px;
}

into the Custom CSS and change 36 to whatever I fancy. So don’t try to find the code take atrain300’s suggested code after the “and” and whack it into the Custom CSS if you have one (if not, download one – I use Theme Junkie Custom CSS plugin).

Prior to this the only way I could reduce the white space was by removing the page title, for eg:

.page-id-12 .entry-title {
display: none;
}

and also by ensuring no H2 style titles are used at the start of the content.

I hope this clarifies atrain300’s post.