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[Smush Pro] GTmetrix Optimize images recommendation.

I get the “Optimize Images” recommendation on GTmetrix although the reported images are Smushed and served from Smush CDN.

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 1:58:06
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  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Roseann,

    I checked your site and there seem to be some caching within previous results and some of the images are gone from the report after I ran a new one without making any changes.

    There are a couple more reported and the report is about original images and not using lossy compression.
    I see in Smush settings that “Super-Smush my images” and “Smush my original full size images” options are disabled, which means that Smush is not optimizing them in the full potential and that original sized images are not optimized, it only optimizes thumbnails.

    Enabling these two options and running a bulk smush again should sort it out.
    If you wish, we can do this for you just let us know if it’s ok to do it, we would want to apply any changes like that without getting a permission first :slight_smile:

    Best regards,
    Predrag

  • Rick Prokupek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Predag: I followed the instructions you gave above and am still getting an F on GT Metrix for “serve Scaled Images” and here is what we get: https://627043.smushcdn.com/889547/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/turkeys-for-header-page-top-row-1-1.jpg?lossy=0&strip=1&webp=1 is resized in HTML or CSS from 753×1004 to 342×455. Serving a scaled image could save 195.6KiB (79% reduction).
    https://aaoutfitter.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/man-whitetail-top_edited-1.jpg is resized in HTML or CSS from 696×928 to 342×455. Serving a scaled image could save 107.6KiB (75% reduction).

    My developer is at a loss to fix this to raise that score. You guys have PERMISSION TO TWEAK anything in the site you feel we have forgotten — I will be away from the office all day today 10/18/2019 and was about to leave now. Thank you in advance for your help.

  • Rick Prokupek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Evening Predag – I am sending you a LONG text from my developer who has thrown his hands up AGAIN with Hummingbird and my GTMetrix scores on a clean site that we built from scratch. Please read the above email FIRST and then this one. We sure do you need your help and I am almost at calf rope spending money trying to get my GTMetrix score up – with Hummingbird running and no Javascript parsed we are running about 3.3sec fully loaded. But our Scores are a D and a D – now read what my developer sent me earlier today: “ok…so explain this to me. i’ve been working on this for 3 hours now. i started with a score of D & D. no matter what i tweaked in the Hummingbird Pro plugin it always came back as D & D. I reset all the Hummingbird settings and ran another score about 20 minutes ago…C & a better D. I turned off the Hummingbird plugin altogether…a better C and the same D. the site is now at a 72 & 65 without Hummingbird running. Uh what? [1:13 PM, 10/18/2019] Christopher: i did some googling about Divi and speed and found two plugin recommendations. the GTmetrix scores are now 75 (C) and 80 (B). HOWEVER, where I see the trade off is the “Fully Loaded Time” of the page is now 6.1 seconds. Which is still in the “green” as the average is 7.3 seconds, but I know you saw earlier where it was 3.3 seconds. Maybe you can go back and say, how come these can do this but yours can’t?

    [1:15 PM, 10/18/2019] Christopher: of course, i just re-ran again and it went down to 5.5 seconds and i did nothing…so it may be the server is just being slow right now.”

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Roseann Mayer

    Thank you for additional information and I’m sorry for delayed response.

    My final question would be – do we care MORE about load times and forget the D score OR should be work on getting a higher score and lower speed

    Both score and speed are usually related but it’s not as simple relationship as it looks (especially taking what tests like GTMetrix or PageSpeed seem to suggest). I would say that load time would be more important than score in the long run, though. I’ve seen many sites that had impressive score but both their tested load time and “subjective” performance was, mildly speaking, rather poor. But I’ve also seen many sites with pretty average score that were loading in a blink of an eye. So there’s no that super-straight relationship there.

    As for the plugins that you are currently using. I must say that I’m not familiar with that Speed Booster Pack at so I’d rather not give any opinion on it. I did check its description though and I also took a liberty of taking a look at current configuration of your site and I think that despite better results that you previously had, it’s not quite a good solution in a long run.

    The thing is that both these plugins – Speed Booster Pack and Autoptimize – attempt to do essentially the same in a big part. They mostly overlap trying to optimize JS/CSS, Autoptimize also caches those assets. Furthermore, the site is powered by Divi which also has JS/CSS optimization options enabled.

    It might be giving better results (score/time) now but in a long run I would eventually expect issues – you might not be able to achieve any better results and/or at some point you might start experiencing some strange/unexpected site behavior. Performance is extremely important, performance score is way less important but “too much” optimization might be equally or even more harmful to the site sometimes as no optimization at all. I believe you got my point :slight_smile:

    Having that said, I realize that you earlier gave us permission to tweak site but since things changed a bit since that, is it still in place? I mean – I would actually like to give it a go and see if I can “squeeze” anything better out of it. If you’re fine with that, let me know – I’ll do my best to restore current configuration exactly after my tests in case it was giving better results after all :slight_smile:

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • Rick Prokupek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Hi Adam – PLEASE PLEASE give it a go – disconnect the other 2 plugins and. go back to Hummingbird, I do so appreciate your kind assistance since my developer has essentially thrown up his hands and this is totally GREEK to me — best to you and I do appreciate you very much!

  • Rick Prokupek
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Adam – it’s Sunday morning in Texas and a beautiful day – I deactivated the -2- optimization plugins that my developer added and re-authorized HUMMINGBIRD – I did a speed test on GTMetrix and Page Speed Insights and they are DISMAL. I read the recommendations on the HUM. dashboard and have no earthly idea how to ‘fix’ the things it is asking, particularly on the ‘first paint’ of the site. I am MORE than happy for you to fix this stuff, I am urgently asking for your help. I am part of a women’s group that a leading developer in our area is going to use as a demo of a properly designed with site (before and after) and I hope to be able to inject into my portion of the presentation the WPMU DEV plugin package and hosting for Word Press as part of the reason it is running well. My developer is done – he says he’s chasing his tail. PLEASE HELP make my site run fast. Best, Roseann Mayer

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Roseann,

    Please note that we’re responding to tickets from oldest to newest comment so each response will push your ticket at the end of the queue and will delay our response time.

    In your last response it seems that you wanted to attach an image but I’m afraid it’s missing, is it related to this comment above that:
    I just asked Mohammed to check these errors and he said I should forward them on to you since they are Smush CDN errors that I got when I went to this site: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?view=fetch-info&id=FeWwV9W_Hsw9MN9824aG2w‘

    I’ve checked this score further and all the images listed there show Other Error are actually loading fine when trying to open them.
    I did some research about this and from what I found out the test performed there is limiting the number of requests it’s sending to site so it doesn’t “overburden” it.
    So it actually didn’t even try to load those images, and when I ran a couple more tests it showed different number of images in there, due to different number of requests sending to your site.
    This is most likely happening due to fairly large amount of images that you have on your home page.

    Based on the information I gathered it seems that this is all fine but if you want to improve this you might want to try reduce the number of images you include on your home page.
    And you might be able to do that by reducing the number of images in your slider above the “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?” section.

    In my personal opinion, there are too many slides in there and barely anyone will click through all of the images, so it might be better to have a separate gallery page where you would show off more image and keep the home page ones to best ones that you want to show.

    Reducing the number of images will also reduce overall page size, which means less data to load and better load times.

    Next thing that seems to be having biggest impact is the file optimization that as I see you already tried doing with other plugins, and while those plugins do offer partly automized optimization Hustle relies on manual configuration.
    That does require more work but it also allows it for more in-depth tweaking to get most of your site.
    Each site is unique because the combination of files loaded depends on the theme and plugins that you are using on your site, and how will they behave when being optimized.

    Asset Optimization can be a lengthy task but it’s pretty straight forward, basically, you’re looking to have as many optimization options enabled without affecting your site optimization.

    I have started doing this on your site by enabling minification and leaving couple of files out of minification you as they were causing issues when minified.
    So now you should enable the other optimization options to find the best combination for speed result, and my suggestion is to do it in bulk of 10 files, optimize them see if site is running fine and continue with next batch.
    If you notice any issues disable the optimization for those files one by one until you see which one is causing the issue and leave it unoptimized.

    I would suggest disabling cache preloading as it can take server resources while you are configuring this and due to that you will not get proper results from page speed tests, you can of course re-enable it after everything is configured.
    And related to above, minification is also process performed on your server, so after you do this give your server a few minutes to “cool down” before running speed test.

    Hope this helps.

    Best regards,
    Predrag