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You are here: Home / FYI / PageSpeed Insights testing with Wordfence

December 3, 2020 by Bobbing Wide

PageSpeed Insights testing with Wordfence

I was recently sent a couple of uninvited messages saying

  1. My site’s slow.
  2. It’s not secure.

I was offered a technical report. I didn’t reply. But I did take action.

Security

I installed Wordfence which implements a firewall and other levels of site security.

Performance

Then I tested the site’s performance using PageSpeed Insights.

Initially the results were pretty bad, especially on the home page, and worse on Mobile than Desktop.

I set about resolving the issues by following the recommendations from PageSpeed Insights to improve the front end.

I also eliminated plugins I didn’t need, to improve the server response at the back end.

Using my oik-bwtrace plugin I was able to monitor the requests coming in from the tools that PageSpeed Insights use, to see how long the server was taking to come up with the goods.

I believe the biggest improvement occurred when I installed a plugin to optimize the JavaScript and CSS.

I ended up with pretty reasonable results for some pages.

Now, before I point fingers, I’m going to spend some time re-analysing the effect of the optimization and caching, with and without each of the plugins that I disabled, and the caching plugins that I tried.

It won’t be a particularly scientific report… just enough to confirm or deny my suspicions.

Front page revisited

Having achieved figures of 85+ for mobile and 95+ for desktop, by implementing CSS and JavaScript optimization to Eliminate render-blocking resources as far as possible, I then considered the images.

I made a pragmatic decision, that I didn’t need the two large background images. So I deactivated the `front-page.php` template.

That did the trick. Mobile is now 99 and Desktop 100.

The page doesn’t say anything now, but it’s pretty fast. Server side execution time is around half a second.

GTMetrix’es report isn’t as glowing, but it’s a still a significant improvement on what it used to be.

Front page images revisited

Having saved the two large background images with a quality of 80%, which reduced their overall size to between 30 and 40% of the originals, I reinstated the front-page.php template.

Mobile is now 94. Desktop’s still 99.

References

Performance analysis tools

  • PageSpeed Insights
  • GTMetrix
  • Pingdom

Image tool

GIMP – Windows version. Export file as JPEG with 80% quality.

Plugins added

During the tests I added these plugins.

  • Wordfence and Autoptimize are still activated; both as Network Activated plugins.
  • Hummingbird made quite a few changes to the .htaccess file. These are still in place, but I’ve deactivated the plugin.
Plugin name and description Plugin links Version, total downloads, last update, tested
Wordfence Security – Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security
Firewall, Malware Scanner, Two Factor Auth and Comprehensive Security Features, powered by our 24 hour team. Make security a priority with Wordfence.
wordfence
home
7.8.2
273,964,076
January 27, 2023
6.1.1
Autoptimize
Autoptimize speeds up your website by optimizing JS, CSS, images (incl. lazy-load), HTML and Google Fonts, asyncing JS, removing emoji cruft and more.
autoptimize
home
3.1.5
33,456,758
January 19, 2023
6.1.1
Hummingbird – Optimize Speed, Enable Cache, Minify CSS & Defer Critical JS
Optimize site speed with best WP cache plugin. Cache, minify CSS & minify JavaScript, defer critical CSS & JS, smush & lazy load images.
hummingbird-performance
home
3.4.0
3,261,808
December 19, 2022
6.1.1

Filed Under: FYI, News Tagged With: performance, security

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02392 410090

Email: herb@bobbingwide.com

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