232 - 'L' is for Loading

A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP.  Today is for L for Loading (Pages Faster).

Preamble

Luckily with Google’s Core Web Vital about to drop in June as SEO no one is talking about speed!!! Not a single person has tested their pages in years. It is perfectly fine for us to talk freely without fear of being fact checked!

No one cares how long WordPress takes to load and what loads!

Core Web Vitals is

We’d all like to pin this down, so here’s some of what it is:

• One of over 200 ranking factors, but we are taking them seriously.
• Probably right, as Google are putting their money where their mouth is with Lighthouse.
• New Experience measures make so much more sense than when we had to look at the whole load (FCP, CLS & FID).
• What is iffy is the way speed is being used to sell solutions (like GDPR).
• It brings up the Gutenberg v’s Page Builder issue, which David thinks of as Page Builder v’s Gutenberg Page Builders.
• At what point does WordPress add a CSS layout system (never?).
• It can become an obsession chasing after the fabled 100 score!

What WordPress loads

This is what WordPress loads by default:

• Could it be regarded as bloadted output?
• Block CSS (can be removed – Jeff Starr’s plugin Disable Gutenberg / not the Classic Editor!! (nearly 60kb and  growing)
• JQuery (87kb), at the top of the document too.
• JQuery Migrate (11kb).
• Emojis JS/CSS (almost 14kb).
• For context GeneratePress advertise a 10kb load.
• Little backend resources used (for 500,000 lines of code).
• Heartbeat (using up CPU).

Tools for looking at the load

Here are a list of some of the tools that we know of to measure page load:

• Google PageSpeed insights / Chrome inspector
• GTMetrix (vanity measure with nice tools)
• Pingdom Tools (next to useless now)
• Web Page Test.org  (serious pro stuff – Google borrowed from it – speed index)
• Query Monitor (plugin)
• Usage DD (plugin)
• https://blackfire.io

Tools for Speeding up sites

These are tools that purport to speed up your site for you:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-asset-clean-up/
• https://perfmatters.io/
• https://flying-press.com/
• https://nitropack.io/  (new JS preloading stuff – is this good or a little unknown?)
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-meteor/
• Of course, a gazillion caching plugins, but we’ve covered that before.

Good plugins and bad plugins

What makes a plugin good or bad? Well here’s come thoughts:

• Mostly silly as we should know what hosting power we need, but does the average WordPress user suddenly do facing all those plugins and blocks?
• It seems odd that even today I write this, sessioned developers are asking for the removal of the global loading of scripts and CSS.
• Comparative theme and builder testing is slightly insane. Asset counting tells us little in the world of experience testing. You would need to be a genius to be able to build like for like across platforms, so tests should measure that ability, not the tools

Other (hosting) Factors

• HTTP/2
• Gzipping/ compression
• Shared hosting
• PHP
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteSpeed_Web_Server

Final thoughts from David

I suspect our focus on what is loading is going to be good for us. I have been obsessed and lost with performance before and see the same inability to rationalise the issue in others and the same misleading marketing is used, but I think there will be no escaping it.

Long term, I do not see this being a massive boost for Gutenberg (it has a TTFB advantage along with being underdeveloped). Everyone can see the Emperor’s New clothes. There is the Halo effect too!