This post will give a progress report on day 4 of the 12-day SEO challenge.
2 posts have already been published in this series that started on 5 April.
The goal is to improve eNitiate Website’s Google mobile pagespeed from a score of 24, 4 days ago (out of 100, as per Graph 1 below), to 50 by the end of the 12-day challenge.
eNitiate Site – Google Pagespeed Score | Mobile | 5 April 2020
There are still 8 days to go as at the time of publishing this post.
Table of Contents
Day 4 of 12-day SEO challenge: progress report
The key focus for the 2 days leading up to this update was digging deeper and identifying plugins that are the key culprits for slowing the eNitiate Website’s loading speeds.
Unfortunately, life had other plans, and I was not able to complete the associated task ☹️.
However, I discovered from further analysis of Google Pagespeed Insights that adding Youtube videos on a Website using the traditional iframe embed was also adding to the slowing of the loading speeds.
I have since added a plugin called WP Youtube Lyte, which will replace Youtube iframe embeds going forward.
This will take care of ensuring that Youtube videos do not affect future load speeds, as explained in this video.
Sadly though, the number of plugins is increasing again, despite my attempt to keep it [the number] down.
I mentioned in the previous post of this 12-day SEO challenge series that the cumulative coding that comes with plugins – the solution for many WordPress Webmasters who are not coders the world over – can also add to slowing of loading speeds.
By the way, there is also another risk to adding too many plugins on your WordPress Website, and that is the prospect that this can lead to the crashing of the site, as we experienced in late 2014, and this is due to the clashing of the coding of some of the plugins.
Ideally, there should not be too many plugins on a Website.
Any improvement in the eNitiate Website loading speeds for mobile as at day 4 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 | 9 April 2020
Notice that the Google Pagespeed Insights score is worse than at the start when it was 24 (see Graph 1 above)? It has also got worse since the day 2 update, when the score was 18.
I was warned that this is going to be a long road and that I am being optimistic with my goal of an improved score of 50 by the end of the 12-day SEO challenge that has only 8 days to go. But I do not plan to revise it.
Focus for the next 2 days
I plan to finalise the outstanding task, which will focus on identifying plugins that are directly responsible for slowing down the Website and finding more efficient alternatives for these.
A report on further progress will follow in the next 2 days, which will be at 50% stage of this 12-day SEO challenge.
Posts in the 12-day SEO challenge series
Click on each image to go to the related post.
