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Challenges with website speed/optimisation work - advice needed!

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Wondering if anyone can shed some light on what to do here because I am a bit lost regarding our website optimisation. (For reference I am the Marketing Manager but do not have a deep understanding on the technical side of things)

We have worked with multiple digital agencies regarding our web optimisation/speed/SEO and lots of dev work has been done to speed things up. We have used GT Metrix to identify the improvements needed and have seen a good improvement across the board. I have attached a screenshot of our GT Metrix which before was rating D & F with a lot of improvement work.

However, now this google update is coming next year I have become aware of the various areas to look at on 'pagespeed insights' and despite all the dev work, our desktop speed is 44 and mobile is a tragic 13! I have also attached a screenshot of our pagespeed insights so you can understand what I am talking about

In the field data and origin summary sections it says there is not enough sufficient real-world speed data so doesn't supply figures for those areas and all other areas seem to be poor and do not mean much to me.

What should I do in this situation and how can I improve the pagespeed insights? Just feels like no matter how much work we do I am just going round in circles!

Thanks in advance!

page speed.PNG

page speed 2.PNG

gt metrix.PNG

mobile page speed 2.PNG

mobile page speed.PNG

Quite a few of the pagespeed recommendations will be micro optimisations, that do help, but typically a score of 13 means there's more going on. I usually run the website through https://www.webpagetest.org because it has a really good waterfall view that tells you how certain assets are loading, the order, and how long they take. If you're able to drop a URL in here too, that would help us identify issues more easily.

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49 minutes ago, Jack said:

Quite a few of the pagespeed recommendations will be micro optimisations, that do help, but typically a score of 13 means there's more going on. I usually run the website through https://www.webpagetest.org because it has a really good waterfall view that tells you how certain assets are loading, the order, and how long they take. If you're able to drop a URL in here too, that would help us identify issues more easily.

Hi Jack,

Thank you for replying - much appreciated! As someone who doesn't fully understand the technical side of things then some of this information can be a bit confusing! I'm just trying to be more informed so that I can go to the developers and get the work done/look into solving it ourselves so just wanted to ask around for advice first. 

The URL is: https://www.pragmatiqsolutions.co.uk/

I have just loaded into the link you have provided but the waterfall and figures do not mean much to me haha

Getting rid of WP bakery would be a good start.

A 4.1Mb homepage, 126 server calls and a number of external sites don't help either.

The SEO agencies you have been working with don't really know what they are doing. They haven't even go the most basic SEO functions in place.

The number of third-party scripts is astounding, only 33% of requests are from your own domain. This is typical for a lot of SEO companies that chuck everything on your site to capture metrics and never consider the extra load time will drive customers away.

Reducing these down to only the essentials will go a long way. You time to first interactive is currently high because it's waiting for every script to finish. Hopefully these links persist, but if you go to https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200623_KK_697ff45a1bfdf0d5476e0e502194e998/1/details/ and scroll down to "Request Details" all of the items in purple are loading before anything is rendered on the screen. Similarly if you look at https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200623_KK_697ff45a1bfdf0d5476e0e502194e998/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1, from around #41 the rest is third-party scripts, everything from your domain is ready at that point.

Replacing the icon font for SVG files will also improve load time, currently some of the largest assets are fonts.

What others have said, but here's what I spotted:

"Avoid excessive DOM size" is often due to poorly written HTML structure. Your home page is quite long so I'd suggest optimising your HTML.

Consider removing one or more custom Google fonts to shed a bit of weight/speed up rendering time, and.or remove unused Google font weights. You're currently calling in 5 fonts + variants, that's a lot for any site.

Get your developer to self host as many Javascripts as you can, or change to a more reliable source. Some stuff hosted with 3rd parties can slow things down a lot.

I didn't look to see but your developer can "delay" loading of javascript, that would mean your pages should load a bit  faster, once the page has loaded then the javascript is downloaded afterwards. It's a bit like traffic management :)

Where you can, review 3rd party widgets and content. Do you really need them, can you find a better alternative?

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