Page load speed concerns.

General Discussions
1

Hi guys,

I wrote a month or two ago about page speed, and I am a little concerned with it still.

Today, I was doing some testing and a report was generated that showed the images in BB required optimization. Not sure what, there were optimized before upload, and the method used (ImageOptim) seems to be working elsewhere on the site.

But the images in the modules seems to be triggering this poor score of 57/100. Image attached.

There isn’t a ton on the page, images are optimized, using WP Rocket to move things along … I would love any insights there might be. :slight_smile: URL is http://ventureweddingphotography.com

Thanks!

Hugh

Speed test

2

Hey Hugh,

I’ve already assigned another member of the team to assist you with your concern.

Ben

3

Thanks Ben.

For some additional info, I tested the home page with GTMetrix, and also a page with less images. There was a big difference. The image page is heavier, but it’s the optimization that it baffling me. :-)Screenshots attached.

Thanks!

Hugh

gt1

gt2

4

Hey Hugh,

These page load/speed tests are always a bit tough. I looked at your site and the images are a good size for page load so that’s great. If you really wanted to, you could resize the images mentioned in the scaled image section. I doubt it will do a ton, but again, if the test is bugging you, feel free to give that a shot. The image dimensions test is one that involves core BB code most likely and something we would need to optimize.

We have plans of looking the builder core code and theme here in the future to further optimize, but that is a bit out and we don’t have a definite timeframe at this point. Sorry if that wasn’t quite the answer you were looking for, but at least you know we’re aware of small optimizations like this that we need to take a look at! :slight_smile:

Best,
Billy

5

Hi Billy,

sadly, I just had to strip a lot out of my home page to improve things. Maybe it will be better later on in development.

Thanks.

Hugh

6

Hi Hugh,

I had a similar “issue”, and I wrote about it in the following article: “Optimizing Wordpress Picture Beaverbuilder Cache”.

I hope this might help you a bit. If you don’t have access by your provided to install the tool, you can alternatively download the images contained in the cache folder, and optimize /shrink them on your PC / Mac and re-upload them.

I hope this will help you.

Regards,

Jeannot

7

Thanks for that Jeannot!

I have been working on things today, and again, the BB pages are causing me issues. Here is a screengrab - the page that is performing well does not have the Page Builder turned on. If I turn it on, without changing the content, the speed drops.

I may have to drop BB I’m afraid. :frowning:

Hugh

Speeds

8

Hi Hugh, In understand were you are coming from and those results might look frustrating, but after 9 years of experience with Wordpress I’m more focused on the “real” speed of a page than those tests. Sadly enough they are usually very important to customers ;-), even though quite irrelevant. I visited your page and I have to say that here in Europe it is relatively fast for a page hosted in the US with many pictures (BTW it really looks great!).

You could use https://spdycheck.org/ SPDY protocol instead of HTTP/1.0 and this will give you a real boost. It almost doubled the performance on https://ramgad.com.

The problem with these tests are that they are only “scores”. So not at all a real test, but assumptions what you could in theory optimize. This is a bit like a system suggesting you as photographer that the delivery of a wedding picture by US Mail will be faster if you are printing the picture on lightweight paper :-). Of course this won’t make the delivery any faster. However, the delivery of a wodden-framed picture might be a different story, as this needs more logistics and a different supplier than US Mail. (hmm, bad example again, this might actually be faster :wink: ).

So, again these scores are indicators, it doesn’t mean though that if you will follow the recommendation it will really speed up your side in real life. At least most likely not noticeably …

Already the fact of using a database-driven system like Wordpress comes at a price: as all the pages need rendering first. That’s where the caching plugins are coming into the game, but a fully handwritten HTML file will always be faster.

But then again, if you are scripting a page on your own, with tools like bootstrap you have again tons of overhead… From CSS files to JS files which are included in those frameworks, but you are most likely only using 10 percent of them … :frowning:

The main speed test I’m using for testing is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ … because this is really measuring the time spend for loading your page. And of course you’ll see differences when changing the settings to Europe or Australia. This is all about physics, you will have a latency here, unless you are using a CDN tool. The good news, on pingdom too your side is doing pretty well! Congrats :wink:

9

Thank you Jeannot, for your detailed reply - I do appreciate it. I’ll go play a little more. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Hugh

10

:slight_smile: - Good luck! on a side note, I’m not affilated with bb, just a paying customer like you are, but I am quite impressed about how easy their tool is working. Get things done is the biggest advantage to me, so that I can concentrate on my main job. Have a great we ahead. Jeannot

11

Hi

Have you tried running Google Page Speed insights after the test Google will send you the optimised images back for you to download. I have not tried this yet but I hope it works usually does. Just bought beaver builder 2 hours ago. Hope this work, Page speed is also very important to me.

Good Luck, William.