Today I decided to invest 1 hour optimizing themightymo.com. Below are the actions I took along with the results.
Speed Benchmarks and Initial Observations
- Before starting on today’s speed optimization, Google Pagespeed Insights scored us as a “44”.
- There’s some files loading from the wp.com cdn (e.g. Jetpack’s cdn) – Google is penalizing me for this stuff.
- Google is actually penalizing me for using Google Tag Manager. ????
- We’re actually scoring an “A” on GTMetrix.
- We scored a “C” on Pingdom.
- Weight of the homepage was 1.4 MB.
Google Lighthouse observations 
We scored a “44” in Google Pagespeed Insights prior to the WordPress optimizations today. 
Pingdom pagespeed score before optimizations 
GTMetrix pagespeed score before optimizations
Initial Optimizations
- Generated and served .webp image files (via SG Optimizer plugin).
- Deferred render-blocking javascript (via SG Optimizer plugin).
- Turned off Jetpack’s cdn.
- Cropped and exported the hero image at 80% quality, which reduced its size from 389k to 79k.
- Removed an unnecessary logo image, which was 60k.
- Exported a testimonial image image at 80% quality, which reduced its size from 162k to 92k.
- Removed an unnecessary background image, which was 273k and replaced it with some glitzy colors.
- Deactivated unneeded plugins.
- Removed the background hero image from mobile views.
Results
After 1 hour of work (including writing this post!), I’m happy to say that I increased my Google Pagespeed Insights score from a “44” to a “77”. Not bad for an hour on a Friday!
- Reduced the total homepage load from 1.4mb to 690k.
From Toby’s Blog
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