[jgitta]

When I install a basic wordpress site and run Pagespeed analyzer I get a score of 100. When i install Babystreet them and all associated plugins the score goes down to 47 and is noticeably slower. This is without any content, images or products. The live site is get scores of 10 and lower.

Is there anything that can be done to make it more efficient? Or is this them not recommended for high traffic ecommerce?

Some of the results from Pagespeed:

First Contentful Paint
3.9 s
First Contentful Paint marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.
Speed Index
12.1 s
Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
Largest Contentful Paint
6.0 s
Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted.
Time to Interactive
8.1 s
Time to interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
Total Blocking Time
70 ms
Sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift
0.204
Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport.

[Althemist]

Hi jgitta,

That’s absolutely normal. Basic WP themes have little CSS and almost no JS, while premium themes and especially page builders would have tons of scripts and styles. What you can do is optimize your WP installation – enable cache, minification, combination, defer loading, enable compression on the server etc.

Here is a basic guide and you can find a a lot more in-depth tutorials on the internet:

Essential Tips To Increase Loading Speed On Your WordPress Website

[jgitta]

I have installs Hummingbird plugin to help with combining css, preloading etc but when I do some of those things, some of the theme features do not work. Custom fonts especially are loading slowly. Many of the recommendations I have researched require coding to make it more efficient. For example adding <link rel=preload> to the files.
How can this be done without actually having to alter code? I would thing that the theme should be written as efficiently as possible.

[Althemist]

Hi jgitta,

Hummingbird is not the best option for WooCommerce sites. I’d suggest using a combination of WP Super Cache and Autoptimize. This is what we use on all our websites and demos.

However, keep in mind that if your hosting is slow, a plugin would not help dramatically.

The theme IS coded “as efficiently as possible”. However, there are certain optimizations that can’t be done inside the theme, so they must be optimized on per WP instance. As for the – it’s already applied everywhere possible (e.g. for fonts and icon fonts). It can’t be used for all kind of resources.

[bratoeva87]

I have the same issue with the theme – PageSpeed Insights Google – Mobile Score – 27, Desktop – 77 after hours of digging what to optimize… Not cool. I am not happy with those scores and also think that the theme should be written as efficiently as possible.

[Althemist]

Hello bratoeva87,

The theme is coded for max performance. However, the actual score would greatly depend on the following factors:

1. First and most important – the hosting quality
2. Your actual content
3. The on-site optimizations you made

There is no theme in the world which can give you good pagespeed stats out-of-the-box. It’s the website administrator job to optimize the content, setup caching, minification, compression etc.

[Author]

Posts