New Landing › How can we help? › Cardinal › Page speed is bonkers after update.

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    Posted in: Cardinal
  • September 21, 2014 at 2:41 pm #113019
    neilswaab
    Member
    Post count: 66

    Not sure what’s going on, but my Google Page Insights are really bad now on desktop. Like horrifically bad. Like 0/100 bad. They were never great with this theme (78/100), but now at 0/100 something’s wrong.

    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=neilswaab.com&tab=desktop

    My Pingdom results are also messed up. I used to have a performance grade of 93/100 with a page size of 2.7mb. Now it’s a performance grade of 76/100 with a page size of 9.2mb.

    http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/eJXZS9/neilswaab.com

    Haven’t changed anything since the 78/100 other than updating the theme to 1.8 and updating some of my blog posts. I have WP Super Cache and Better WP Minify activated.

    It looks like most of the problems are coming from images and optimization. Did you guys change something there? I seem to remember the thumbnails being 400px wide natural, but now on my site it looks like they’re loading them in at 800px wide and having the browser resize to 263px?

    Any help you can provide would be much appreciated.

    September 21, 2014 at 5:52 pm #113053
    FlawlessWeb
    Member
    Post count: 542

    +1.

    I haven’t checked any of the speed test sites, but my cardinal sites are loading slower since update to 1.8

    September 21, 2014 at 8:47 pm #113074
    neilswaab
    Member
    Post count: 66

    To make matters even more confusing, now my website is back to the original stats. AND the thumbs are back to being 400px wide. Literally haven’t touched a thing on the site since this morning.

    Here’s the most current Pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cAWm2r/http://neilswaab.com

    And here’s one from this morning: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cZTtD0/http://neilswaab.com

    Totally completely different. What do you think is going on here?

    September 21, 2014 at 9:21 pm #113082
    neilswaab
    Member
    Post count: 66

    Another interesting thing: looking at the cached vs. not-cached version of the site, the thumbnails are completely different. Check out the cached.jpg which highlights the thumbnail coming in at 400px. The non-cached.jpg when I’m logged in shows the thumbnail at 800px.

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    September 22, 2014 at 7:07 am #113145
    Kyle – SUPPORT
    Moderator
    Post count: 35880

    Hi

    On the slower one, you have a lot of images that are 100,200,300 KB, but you don’t have those images on the first test. That’s what’s causing the difference

    – Kyle

    September 22, 2014 at 12:05 pm #113284
    neilswaab
    Member
    Post count: 66

    Yes, that’s correct. It’s because the theme is loading completely different thumbnails. How does that work? Does the theme load 800px thumbs on retina and 400px on non-retina?

    I’m wondering if there’s a caching issue causing the difference which might explain why I see different thumbnails when logged in? Which concerns me a bit if the retina 800px actually are what’s supposed to be loaded instead and not the 400px ones as a 9mb page is pretty hefty.

    Is there any way to get the size of the thumbnails down to make the page more manageable? My images are typically saved around 1600px wide at 40% jpg quality, progressive. And then uploaded to WordPress for the theme to do all the magic of generating thumbnails.

    Or is there any way for the theme to not have to load all the thumbnails before the page initializes? And just lazy load the rest?

    September 23, 2014 at 1:30 pm #113737
    Kyle – SUPPORT
    Moderator
    Post count: 35880

    Basically the theme uses certain sizes for certain assets etc. And on retina will show 2x the image or it’s full size.

    The issue with your page speed is nothing to do with the themes image size settings, it’s just that your uploading large file size images. For e.g. http://neilswaab.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/stonedranger2.jpg is 831KB (see my screenshot)

    That’s way too big, you need to optimize your images better so they are below 150kb max.

    Try using https://compressor.io/

    – Kyle

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    September 24, 2014 at 4:59 am #113927
    neilswaab
    Member
    Post count: 66

    OK, I think I was just used to my last theme where I could upload images any size and the theme would do the work of resizing and compressing to an acceptable web size. I tried what you suggested and it’s certainly helped (compressor.io didn’t do anything for me, but going back to Photoshop did). What’s worked for me so far on this theme is to upload separate thumbnails at 800px instead of the full-size images. That way I can save them at a small enough file size below 100k in Photoshop.

    Your theme doesn’t use any compression does it? I’m thinking about experimenting with tuning down the standard WordPress compression of 90 to something like 50 or 60 to get the rest of my thumbnails down. If it works the way I’m hoping, then that should drastically speed things up.

    September 24, 2014 at 7:00 am #113949
    Kyle – SUPPORT
    Moderator
    Post count: 35880

    No problem. The theme makes smaller versions of the images, however it does not change quality.

    – Kyle

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