I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but my page speed scores on my own agency website and the mobile version of the Permaslug site sucked until just 24 hours ago. (If you don’t want to read my wall of text, a video will be coming soon as always 😁)
As you know, there are a million page speed improvement plugins out there, but I get so frustrated with all the granular options and tweaks many of them force you to make. While this is good to get the absolute last drop of performance out of your site, I’m ok with 95% performance in exchange for far less hassle and setup.
So, once again, Kyle Van Deusen from The Admin Bar shared with me another amazing tools: Perfmatters. It’s another page speed optimization plugin, but it’s so simple to use and as it turns out, extremely effective, even on Oxygen sites.
You’re probably like… wait a second, I thought Oxygen was supposed to be the solution to all my page speed woes? Well it is, but as soon as you start adding YouTube video embeds, Calendly bookings, google fonts, etc (all things my agency site and the Permaslug site have) the extra JavaScript and 3rd party code really destroys your load speed experience for visitors and your scores from both PSI and Gtmetrix.
So, here’s what I did to take my APEX Web Solutions site from a mobile score of 30 to 77 on Page Speed Insights and the Permaslug site from a mobile score of 31 to a 76.
If you want to skip the jargon and just get to Perfmatters, please consider using my link: https://jonathanjernigan.com/go/perfmatters
Perfmatters Settings
General
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Disable emojis, dashicons, xml-rpc, jquery migrate, wp version, rss feeds, rss feed links, comments, comment urls
Assets
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Defer Javascript
Preloading
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Enabled instant page
Lazy loading
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Images
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iframes and videos
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youtube preview thumbnails
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Threshold 25%
Other non-perfmatters changes
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Install google fonts locally via Matt Hias‘ method
- Disabled Google Fonts in Oxygen Builder settings
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Disabled FB pixel and hotjar code (I wasn’t even using this junk, that added over 10 points by itself)
I still have more optimizations I want to do, but this tool is now going on every single Oxygen site whether it be for our clients, our own projects, etc. The performance is amazing and since it will be setup out of the box, we will essentially have to do nothing to keep performance incredibly high.
Again, I’d greatly appreciate you using my link if you’re interested: https://jonathanjernigan.com/go/perfmatters