OMG Page Speed

Website Page Speed

OMG – the website page speed project. You really wanna do such a project? The website page speed project? Oh well, prepare yourself some time and hope you have more time. Make a backup of your website as well!

How on earth did I get on this website page speed stuff? Yeah, right, the beautiful SEO has driven me on this path. “Miss Google” with all her moods and changes. She wants to be spoilt, she wants to show off with all her lovely “jewelry” and fancy websites on top. “Hey, I wanna be there too.” I have great nature and wildlife photographs….etc., I even sell photography prints and stock photos license! …. “Sooo Miss Google, and … and … more flowers I need to send her way!

My very first mission was the Search Engine Optimization project. Keywords yeah. This means I need to please Miss Google, send her the Dutch flower fields, Belgium cookies, and Swiss chocolate in the form of keyword phrases and many blog posts. Can someone lend me the time for blog posts, please?

Okay, pleasing Miss Google. HOW… with website page speed?  I sat down for 3 months to learn all about keywords…. till next time, Miss Google has one of her moods to change her jeans, shoes, or dress! On my way to learn all this SEO keywording and more, I stumbled over this little add on, website page speed. Heck, what is this now? Another thing to learn to get my site on page #1 – #5! Ooooh, Miss Google, I never will be able to please you, am I?

Page speed website photo page speed scan showing how fast the website is opening

Well, that page speed does not look good at all.

Now Website Page Speed

With help from Diego, my right hand in the coding, and all of this website, we started the website page speed project. First, as usual, reading the internet from top till toe and from right to left all about for new project: WEBSITE PAGE SPEED … side project: Learn!

How to do website page speed

How to do website page speed when you have two hands, a mouse, and lots of plugins to choose from.

Website page speed scan run and first “show off” 81/100 orange, bummer, what can be optimized. There are 2 scanners for page speed I use. Google insight page speed and GTmetrix, the rest I found was pretty much the same as GTmetrix. Google insights a tad moody, bringing numbers like the lottery here and there.

The scan is done 81/100. What came up first, of course, who has guessed this not? Optimize photographs to gain more website page speed. Okay, in short, and on the dot: Cut the photograph files size down, what the heck get them smaller for Speedy Gonzales page speed! The best is, leave the photographs off your website, if you want to have light speed!

Plugin for “smashing” / downsizing your photographs – WP Smush.it – I ran this plugin for nearly all photographs I did one photograph after the other, single-use. I read in the reviews that one person said this plugin mixed up a few codes when used at the full media library at once in WP. It took me a while to get all photographs done! It does an excellent job for sure. If you use Photoshop or any other software to downsize, check the quality as well. I cannot smash the size of the files to the bottom, my photographs need to show high quality, of course!

Google Insights for page speed

Google insights page speed showed a few more things. Change a few codes to downsize them, minify HTML here and there. We just were fixing all that those page speed tools were telling us to do and what we could do. This Reduce server response time, excuse me, 0.38sec, is that not fast enough for Miss Google? Well, send me a rocket, please!

Hyper Cache – we had this plugin installed since startup. We tried the W3, but this mixed up quite a few things to the dark side. Hyper Cache is for us. Get a Cache plugin, does great stuff.

Diego changed more codes, I really downsized the arrows of the homepage and all social media icons showing on the website, in Photoshop. I downsized them to the edge, as small as possible file size. Flea size!

My website has it’s own IP address – called dedicated IP address, this helps a lot as well for the website page speed.

Page speed website image showing two page speed tools the website speed

That looks much better, but still, the mobile speed is not as it should be. Edit April 2020, please make sure that your mobile speed is fast as well.

Conclusion of this website page speed project

Miss Google Insights page speed shows what she feels like it today or tomorrow or next week, in my holy opinion! I never get smart out of her. Sounds familiar to men, I know.

GTmetrix shows what you changed for page speed. So we stuck with that one. Simple, because this page speed site shows what to improve and helps much more with suggestions than Miss Google! Well, Miss Google was for me a tad complicated!

Overall what can help you for page speed?

Make your photographs smaller, but stick to quality. Also, your social icons, arrows, and whatever icons or signs you have on your website. DOWNSIZE them!

  • Get the right plugins to downsize photographs if you like. Example – WP Smush.it
  • Get for sure a Cache Plugin to cache your site. Read the reviews of plugins and learn how to set them!
  • Switch off plugins, which you need only sometimes in your WordPress!
  • Try to get rid of plugins you do not use or need. Keep the plugin number low.
  • If you have some pocket money left to invest in a dedicated IP-address and maybe even to let your site run over a CDN like Cloudflare. This improves your website page speed too.
  • A note on the site. Protect your website against hackers!

What about Retina screens?

How do photographs show on those screens?  – Good grief! “Miss Google, help needed for that kind of Photographers’s website page speed SEO, PLEASE!”

That’s about it. There are a few more things out there to learn, but we did not try them yet.

You may want to have a look at our website design and WordPress Photoshelter integration!

Have a lot of fun whenever you start this website page speed project. Make sure to have always backup files of your website. A crash can happen fast!

PS. For sure, some SEO website crawlers are running now through my post. They grab somehow my e-mail address, yep try that, and will bombard my inbox with all SEO “stuff” to improve my website page speed and SEO. In case you read this, here is the deal. You improve my SEO, and I give you 1-2 big prints of my great African wildlife photographs for your office.

Don’t come with such: We bring your website on page one, on position one. I sit there already when you Google my name: Anette Mossbacher!

Photoshelter Beam review, oh-la-la, something different! You are interested in camera gear, that is the place to look.

2 thoughts on “OMG Page Speed

  1. Tomasz Dobrzyński says:

    Actually you don’t need to disable plugins to make your website faster (but of course such a move will be appreciated). To speed up the front-end layer of your website you can dequeue scripts and styles. I’m pretty sure you don’t use all of the available plugins on each page of your website. There’s a solution that can help you disable unwanted CSS/JS or here’s a function that you can use to unload unwanted resources.

    • anette says:

      Hi Tomasz, thank you very much for your time to send the info. I will have a look into it for sure. It is always useful 😀
      Wish you a great day

      Ciao Anette

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *