Site loading speed too low. Any tips or tricks to improve loading speed?

Hi there - I am attempting to increase site speed. I have followed all the steps from the blog post linked below. I also have used WP Optimize as well. Despite these steps, the time it takes for mobile to load is still poor at ~9.1s and the total blocking time is 14,260 ms.

Please advise what I can do to improve my site speed!

Blog post I’m referencing: How to Speed up a Directory or Marketplace Website Built with HivePress | HivePress Blog

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Please consider using LiteSpeed without extra caching plugins because they may conflict. If you check your site in PageSpeed tool there’s usually a list of suggestions, this way you can check if it’s the server load time (object cache, VPS & SSD hosting, etc) or the browser time (optimizing images, minifying JS & CSS, settings cache TTL, etc).

My website is running on LiteSpeed without extra caching plugins, there aren’t any other additional plugins so far, still the website self lacks with Performance, the pictures self for the landing page i can convert by myself into webp, but what i cant control are the file formats of uploaded media in the listings, the report self of the website is as following:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsjeme.org%2F

The error with image elements affects even images of categories:

Based on the suggestions, deferring and/or reducing JavaScript should resolve most of the issues, for example the Google Ads script alone causes a delay of 2 seconds. Also, try setting a higher cache policy for static assets (currently set to 7 days).

I followed the optimized setting for LiteSpeed based on this article: Optimizing WordPress to 100% With LiteSpeed Cache Plugin

My site is till running slow (under 50 score for mobile) after making all of the changes and optimizing all the images. Additionally, after implementing the LiteSpeed changes, my site is no longer loading properly for users using Google Chrome in Incognito mode.

Can you advise how I can fix this?

After months trying to understand what to do I leaved Litespeed and buyed WP Rocket (the price is very affordable). In my case there were conflicts between Cloudflare and Litespeed. I experienced a great speed improvement as soon as I installed WP Rocket with the default settings. I found it much easier to use and my pagespeedinsights rank grew from about 80 to 96/97 on desktop and from about 50 to 70/80 on mobile. GTX metrix grew from C to A. I installed it less than a week ago. I absolutely recommend it.

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Please check the PageSpeed suggestions and try to resolve them one by one, Google provides the detailed suggestions and possible solutions via PageSpeed. Resolving each issue indicated by PageSpeed will make the rank higher.

@zombiesquadcollection Thanks for sharing!

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Any advice or insight on how to resolve the “Reduce initial server response time”? I’m struggling with figuring out the next steps for that one after everything else I’ve completed.

I had initial server response time problem.
This were my PageSpeed Insights metrics on 09 October:
Data_09-10

I started deleting all unnecessary plugins:
Plugins_10-10

This is the result after deleting unecessary plugins:

Than I deleted litespeed and installed WP Rocket on 12 October and these are the results:

As you can see the initial server response time changed from 960ms (and it was a good result in that date!) to 300ms.
Hope this helps :slight_smile: :shushing_face:

Yes, the server response time depends on third-party plugins, hosting plan and other server-level settings. For example if your website supports object cache you can enable it in LiteSpeed settings (object cache is enabled by the hosting provider).

Google Ads has been removed completely, i have followed your tutorial for setuping LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for HivePress, and still the results are the same, i m hosting on same server 15+ more websites (litespeed server), and with other WP Themes i m reaching in each category over 95 points, but just with HivePress theme not, and same results are with the demo self:
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flistinghive.hivepress.io%2F

So its not about us or ours server configurations, the theme self must and should be improved in the next updates.

I have even tried to setup HivePress on AWS machine (5GBit/s port), LiteSpeed (CyberPanel Enterprise), (32GB RAM & 8 CPU Cores) + CloudFlare premium CND solution for WordPress, and the results were always the same, zero improvement.

Wouldn’t it be much better if the developer took care of it, because apparently the error messages are caused by the theme self. There are little things that have to be adjusted once, but which will have an extremely good effect on the optimization, i’m very interested in purchasing all of the plugins by the end of this month, but the only thing holding me back are the minor issues with the theme and loading times. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in premium themes because they don’t belong in my niche in terms of design, and the “free” version is in my opinion anyway the best modular solution right now. I’m also not interested in putting you down or badly criticizing your work, and I’m more than thankful for the free version of the plugin and theme. So we should work as a community to make this project better and stay in development for a long time. Maybe we should create a ToDo list with all things that can be fixed in the next updates, and of course there shouldn’t be a lack of constructive suggestions.

My suggestions:

  • set one default font type locally
  • load geo map scripts locally, if possible
  • thumbnails of listings should be converted automatically in to WebP formats (right now i have to use another plugins for it which costs monthly…)

Another stuff which is recommended by PageSpeed can be improved with the time like the case is with render-blocking resources.

Thanks for your feedback, we’ll try to do what we can to improve the performance out of the box, but most of the performance issues are not related to HivePress, for example:

  • Image optimization
  • Deferring scripts
  • Deferring fonts
  • Sending cache expiration headers with every request
  • Combining styles and scripts

We already minify all the JS and CSS in HivePress, but we can’t combine all the website styles and scripts into a single file since this would affect other plugins, this should be done by the cache/optimization plugin. Image optimization (WEBP generation and replacement) is also beyond the HivePress plugin territory, image uploads are implemented on the WordPress level. To resolve the mentioned issues we would have to develop something like LiteSpeed or WP Rocket and include it in HivePress.

I checked your site again and it seems that Mapbox CSS causes most of the issues, you can try switching to Google Maps because it loads styles/scripts asynchronously. Also, you can set a higher cache expiration Screenshot by Lightshot then this suggestion will disappear and the rank will be higher.

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Hi - following the advice of this thread. I installed WP Rocket. After installing, my site is still at ~30 on PageSpeed for mobile and ~80-90 for Desktop. WP Rocket provided no improvement.

What else should I do?

90% of the time the fault lies with the hosting server,
try to keep the design very very simple, I don’t use cache plugin.
Remove unnecessary things on each page to avoid loading

Please share a link to your site and I’ll check it, if Google lowers the PageSpeed rank it always list the suggestions to improve it. I noticed that most of the issues are caused by Mapbox so we’ll check if there’s a way to defer all their scripts and styles in the next HivePress Geolocation update.

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See here for the link: https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fusegotu.com%2F

The site is usegotu.com. I was able to improve mobile up to 60-75 after working with the different settings, and installing Imagify. However, it’s still too slow on mobile so I would appreciate any insight. Additionally, the site logo (“gotu” in the top left) is blurry after optimizing. I think I just need to re-upload it, as it appears Imagify removed too much of the resolution, but if you have any other insight, please let me know.

Exactly, my logo was blurry too for few days.

Please also combine non-external CSS (it seems that each CSS file is loaded separately), generate WEBP image replacements, consider disabling third-party plugins or even switching the hosting provider. These suggestions are related to the issues that are left there Screenshot by Lightshot

If it’s possible, I recommend using SVG for the logo image, then it’s quality will not be affected. Also, LiteSpeed should have some option to exclude images from optimization by file names or patterns, but I’m not sure.

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