This post will give a progress report as at day 2 of the 12-day SEO challenge – a series geared at improving eNitiate Website loading speed.
The first post was published on 5 April, at which stage I gave myself a target to improve the eNitiate Website Google mobile pagespeed score from 24 (out of 100, as per Graph 1 below) to 50.
eNitiate Site – Google Pagespeed Score | Mobile | 5 April 2020
As per my promise in the first post in this series, I shall be giving an ongoing progress report on the steps taken to improve the pagespeed score every 2nd day.
Here we go.
Table of Contents
Day 2 of 12-day SEO challenge: progress report
What have I done in the last 2 days?
First, I read up on what I need to do the improve to improve the Google mobile. After searching and going through multiple sources, Neil Patel‘s post on the topic stood out.
One common advice from the articles I went through is that it is always best to start from the simplest to the most difficult task.
Here is a list of tasks I undertook thus far, in line with the advice:
- I started by checking all the WordPress plugins on the eNitiate Website, to identify non-essential ones that can be removed without affecting the running of the site.
I use a minimum of 27 plugins to run the site, some come with light and others with heavy coding.
Cumulatively, the coding from plugins can slow the loading speed of the site.
I discovered as I was busy with this post that there is more I should have done.
This will become part of the next steps. See the next steps section below. - Next, I compressed all the images on the eNitiate Website using Smush Pro plugin, a whole 10 676 of them.
We use a lot of images on the site, evidently.
The paid version of Smush is a great option, as it also has lazy load and CDN (Content Delivery Network) functionalities that are key to improving Website page speeds. - I then installed a free version of Autoptimise plugin, which I used mainly to minify HTML, Javascript and CSS coding on the site.
Thus, minifying the coding, including from plugins, is an important part of improving Website speed. - The last task was to install the Humingbird Pro plugin, which I used to cache the Website, and compressed Webpages and stylesheets.
I also use this plugin to run ongoing internal tests and identify improvement opportunities.
eNitiate Site – Humingbird Performance Test Score | 7 April 2020
Any improvement in the eNitiate Website loading speeds for mobile on day 2 of the 12-day SEO challenge?
Here is eNitiate Website’s Google Pagespeed Insights result for mobile, which was run not long before this post was published:
eNitiate Site – Google Pagespeed Score | Mobile | 7 April 2020
Comparing Google Pagespeed Insights scores of graphs 1 (taken on 5 April) and 2 (taken on 7 April) seems to show that the tasks outlined in the previous section have not bourne the desired results.
In fact, it may also seem that the loading speed has deteriorated since then.
Clearly, there is still a lot of work ahead.
Focus for the next 2 days
The first task in the next 2 days will start with going back to testing all the active plugins that are currently used on the eNitiate Website, and identify those that are responsible for slowing the loading speed of the site.
I am hoping that I shall be able to replace the culprits without any adverse effect on the Website.
The steps for this task are outlined in this article.
The 3rd post that will be giving account of progress in this 12-day SEO challenge series will be in the next 2 days 🤞🏾🤞🏾.
Posts in the 12-day SEO challenge series
Click on each image to go to the related post.
