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.