I was recently sent a couple of uninvited messages saying
- My site’s slow.
- 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
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 |
7.11.0 324,181,557 November 28, 2023 6.4.2 |
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 |
3.1.10 37,834,033 November 14, 2023 6.4.2 |
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 |
3.7.0 3,924,137 December 6, 2023 6.4.2 |