This site is being used to prepare for the WordPress Portsmouth Meetup on 16th February 2022.
The home page was deliberately constructed to provide a performance analysis score that fails the performance analysis tests run by Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. I then copied it to another page and developed several improvements.
Performance scores
Home page (10 Feb 12:13), was created with Elementor, using the Simple Owl Carousel plus a NextGEN gallery. I also had 10 of the top 12 plugins, and The Events Calendar plugin activated. To understand these values see Process.
Elementor (10 Feb 21:20). This is the clone of the home page.
Big images (11 Feb 11:11) is the clone of the home page recreated using Simple Owl Carousel and the NextGEN gallery but without Elementor.
webp images (11 Feb 11:18) is the same page with each image replaced by a WebP version scaled to 1120px wide.
Home page (11 Feb 12:02). These are the figures for the home page after improving the Recent posts section to set a width for the Featured image block.
In each of the above tests the activated plugins were unchanged.
Introducing oik-unloader
Using the oik-unloader plugin I can dynamically deactivate plugins that aren’t needed. I significantly reduced the active plugins on the home page, but didn’t change the plugins on these clone pages. I also did the same for this page, and measured the server response before and after. See About page server timing. But I left the slow pages alone. Any figures obtained for pages under Process should therefore still be poor.
Introducing oik-loader
Eventually I’d had enough of the poor performance of the site due to the excessive loading times of the unnecessary plugins. I made some improvements to my oik-loader plugin and reversed the logic.
Instead of unloading the plugins on the Home and About us pages, I’ve deactivated the plugins I really don’t need and configured oik-loader to load them on the poorly performing pages.
Latest performance scores
These are the latest performance figures for the About and Home pages.
References
