Page Speed is dismal...Any help appreciated

[Maudiggity]

Hi all,

I recently joined the community with this post (in case you want a bit of backstory on my site).

Ryu recommended I post in here asking for some help...

I'll cut to the chase and say that my page speed appears to be dismal.

This is an internal page, and it's the same story for every page I've tested (desktop score is 32 for the page above), including the homepage (mobile = 18, Desktop = 33).

When I visit the pages in real-time though, they appear to load quickly and can be interacted with straight away.

Looking at my speed history, I can see that the page speed increased when my ad network went live. At about that time I disabled an optimising plugin my dev installed because I couldn't get it to play nice with the ads JS. It didn't seem to have any effect on the site, but my coding knowledge is shit, so in retrospect I may have misunderstood that. That dev has said he's too busy to help, so no luck there. I've also reached out to the ad network and they've said that they tested and the ads are only increasing load time by 392 ms ("less than the blink of an eye").

Bad results on GTmetrix as well:

I'm not sure what a lot of this means and I'm struggling to figure it out on my own.

I'm currently hemorrhaging traffic, so I want to fix it in order to understand if this is contributing (I was smashed by the May update, saw a bit of recovery, and then losing traffic again since start of August).

Below is all the plugins I have installed:

Plugin Name	Activated?
Affiliate Link Finder	No
Akismet Anti-Spam	Yes
Autoptimize	Yes
Classic Editor	Yes
Code Snippets	Yes
Contact Form 7	No
Element Pack	Yes
Elementor	Yes
Elementor Pro	Yes
Google XML Sitemaps	Yes
Insert Amz Images	Yes
Insert Headers and Footers	Yes
RS FeedBurner	No
ShortPixel Image Optimizer	Yes
Simple Social Share	Yes
UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore	Yes
W3 Total Cache	Yes
Word Stats	Yes
Wordfence Security	Yes
Yoast SEO	Yes
Javascript Optimization	No
Web Font Optimization	Yes

Any insights appreciated. Also open to employing someone to do this. I checked one provider out and they said they start at $2000, which was surprising to me to say the least.

Cheers!

 

[FIREman]

I'm pretty sure the 700+ requests made has something to do with the speed

 

[ToffeeLa]

Was your page speed acceptable before you started mucking around with the ad stuff? Or was it just not as appalling?

Do you have enough knowledge to create a page with no ads to test virgin page speed (and preferably removing any other unnecessary gubbins that might be slowing the site down)? Or do you have, for example, an imprint page with no product or ads on it that you can also test for a base page speed?

they start at $2000, which was surprising to me to say the least.

Well, according to your figures you are still earning 24k, even if you are losing 36k a month. Paying peanuts to monkeys is possibly what landed you with a webdev who worked on a site with atrocious page loading times and now is too busy to solve any problems. Don't be a tightwad.

 

[Maudiggity]

Was your page speed acceptable before you started mucking around with the ad stuff? Or was it just not as appalling?

Yeah it was definitely acceptable. Less than half what you're seeing there. Never great GPSI scores, but not as bad as they are either.

Do you have enough knowledge to create a page with no ads to test virgin page speed (and preferably removing any other unnecessary gubbins that might be slowing the site down)? Or do you have, for example, an imprint page with no product or ads on it that you can also test for a base page speed?

I don't have enough knowledge at the moment, but can figure out out. Thanks, that's a good suggestion.

Well, according to your figures you are still earning 24k, even if you are losing 36k a month. Paying peanuts to monkeys is possibly what landed you with a webdev who worked on a site with atrocious page loading times and now is too busy to solve any problems. Don't be a tightwad.

A lot of strange assumptions in here. There are other costs to running a website, as I'm sure you'd know. Also, just because I can afford to pay a lot for a service, does that mean I should? I've asked what's included in that $2k, and they haven't replied. My Dev was good, I paid him fairly and I thought he did a good job. I got him to do it long before my site was earning current numbers too.

I'm pretty sure the 700+ requests made has something to do with the speed

Haha, yeah I reckon too.

 

[ToffeeLa]

A lot of strange assumptions in here. There are other costs to running a website, as I'm sure you'd know. Also, just because I can afford to pay a lot for a service, does that mean I should? I've asked what's included in that $2k, and they haven't replied. My Dev was good, I paid him fairly and I thought he did a good job. I got him to do it long before my site was earning current numbers too.

No, I don't think you should pay a lot of money for a service just because you can. But thinking that $2k (or more) is a lot when your current problem is losing you 18 times that every month is simply a difference in the way we perceive things. It's certainly not a figure I would initially consider out of order from someone reputable for an analysis and report, especially given the earnings history and potential of your site.

Re your web dev. you are correct. I had assumed from what you said that your connection was more recent and ongoing when you mentioned him. Nonetheless, the page speed scores you report even at your best times were adequate to mediocre and it is something which has repeatedly been implicated in site drops (and imo is only likely to become more important). This might be an opportunity to find another dev with more experience in that side of things.

What does the Google Search Console (if you have it running for this site) think about the mobile friendliness of your pages? And (if it is running) have you had a message that your site has been switched to mobile-first?

 

[Maudiggity]

But thinking that $2k (or more) is a lot when your current problem is losing you 18 times that every month is simply a difference in the way we perceive things. It's certainly not a figure I would initially consider out of order from someone reputable for an analysis and report, especially given the earnings history and potential of your site.

Very fair point. I will admit that to an extent I have buried my head in the sand with this and tried not to stress about it too much / tell myself there's a lot more going on than this / tell myself other stuff...That said, I'm not sure that saying I'm losing that much / mnth because of poor site speed is correct. The May 4th update hit me hard, and that was before implementing the ads and seeing the page speed decrease. Plus, there are plenty of other things that could be contributing to the drop in traffic. Rarely is it a single issue, as I understand it...

Nonetheless, the page speed scores you report even at your best times were adequate to mediocre and it is something which has repeatedly been implicated in site drops (and imo is only likely to become more important). This might be an opportunity to find another dev with more experience in that side of things.

No arguments here. The trouble I've always found is that it's hard to know who is competent when this is not my area of expertise, and also who to trust with such a valuable asset.

What does the Google Search Console (if you have it running for this site) think about the mobile friendliness of your pages? And (if it is running) have you had a message that your site has been switched to mobile-first?

I think it all looks ok? Except the core web vitals, which is related to the optimisation issue right?

Yes, the mobile-first message came ages ago, long before all this.

 

[ToffeeLa]

Of course, solving one problem doesn't mean that you have corrected all the problems. But you have to go through and tick the list of what might be causing problems, starting with the most likely.

A non-jaundiced fresh eye might be just what you need. Even to the stage of hiring some independent people with mobile phones for an hour each, asking them to find your site, find a product they most like the look of and do whatever the purpose of the site is (click a link, add to basket, fill out a form, etc.). Watch them, say nothing and see what happens and what their reactions are.

I understand what you mean when you are looking for someone to hire outside your area of expertise - really we can only go on personal recommendation and/or feeling, whether it is graphics, CRO, page speed, video or whatever...

Does this say anything interesting about what is delaying your site?

 

[Maudiggity]

Of course, solving one problem doesn't mean that you have corrected all the problems. But you have to go through and tick the list of what might be causing problems, starting with the most likely.

Very true.

Does this say anything interesting about what is delaying your site?

Honestly, I don't know:

 

[ToffeeLa]

If you click on the First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint headings, they will give you an outline of what they mean. (TLDR: FCP means the time until the first item appears on the page and LCP the time until most of the content appears - both are substantial in your case.)

To give you a comparison, I have a site which has a number of external scripts on it (FB pixel, Google Analytics, Google Maps, cookie consent) which I haven't particularly optimised for speed. Currently the mobile is 64 and desktop 86 for Page Speed Insights (OK to mediocre).

My FCP: 1.181 Your FCP: 3.694
My LCP: 1.647 Your LCP: 4.661
My Document Complete: 3.815 Your Document Complete: 15.847

Easy wins for you (or a dev): have a look further down the Page Speed Insights page under the Opportunity heading and see which, if any, you could implement.

 

[CCarter]

I’ll just say this, the reason a lot of SEO experts don’t do client work anymore after a certain point and only work on their own projects is because certain things like pagespeed optimization are intangible, you don’t see immediate results unless you are dead in the water, it is not appreciated.

Analyzing your whole setup, figuring out what is slowing it down, removing it and replacing it - potentially coding up a replacement from scratch - it’s a lot of work.

When people don’t understand the value of something all they do is look at the price, but that doesn’t take into account years of experience the developer has to get to the point of fixing your potential problems.

Trust me, if a developer tells you they are too busy it is because you are paying too little or don’t appreciate their work and low ball them. How can someone be too busy for money when their passion is developing?? During Covid? No.

Even if he had a full-time job he could work on it on the weekends.

Old me initially saw this thread and saw your problem, then you said $2k was “surprising”, I lost interest in helping or even referring someone cause all you see is the price yet aren’t considering the opportunity cost of not fixing your pagespeed for your future revenue.

Let me give you an analogy: your girlfriend/wife drives her car daily with your child in it. One day you borrow her car and realize her brakes and tires are extremely bad yet she never notices it. You tell her to take it to the shop and fix the brakes. She says no she doesn’t want to pay $2k to get new brakes and new tires cause doesn’t think anything is wrong. Apparently death of her and/or your child isn’t a red flag. What would you do?

I personally wouldn’t even listen and take the car in and get new brakes and tires. This risk to her and my child is too great to deal with ignorance. I would only inform her later on that i put new tires and brakes on the car or maybe just skip the argument of her knowing.

In that scenario you are the developer and she is you. Your developer has fixed tons of problems in the past that you were unaware of, so if they are refusing now they have given up since there is no appreciation.

Maybe your developer really is too busy, but my gut as a developer myself tells me it is more so they don’t want to work with you anymore. Why? Probably lowballing them or lack of appreciation.

700 requests - either you got a ton of images that are not being lazy loaded or a ton of ADs creating massive amounts of traffic requests. Either way you still have your head in the sand and your problem will continue to persist until it is way too late for anyone to help you.

You won’t be able to fix this problem yourself. You can try but this is a scenario for an expert.

Solution: Get 8-10 quotes on fixing the pagespeed. Throw out the lowest quotes cause those clowns are inexperienced. Then negotiated to only pay after you see the before and after pagespeeds for the top 10-20 pages have improved. You have to take the before screenshots.

If you think about doing that scenario with the cheapest guys you’ll be more fucked.

Afterwards send your old developer some gift like some rum or wine. Them knowing your project in and out literally would cut down potential development time, get them back.

 

[maximus]

it’s a lot of work.

basically this. It’s certainly not impossible to fix but it requires a deep understanding of how shit works not only on the application frontend level (wp + php) but also on server backend level (caching,dns,cdn etc) behind the scenes. You can spend the next 6 mo - 1 year trying to understand and implement properly or just pay someone todo the work right.

ive been able to take bloated 8-15 second wp load times down to 2-3 seconds even with 25+ plugins and multiple page builders like elementor running simultaneously.

wordpress is a double edged sword.

 

[Maudiggity]

Old me initially saw this thread and saw your problem, then you said $2k was “surprising”, I lost interest in helping or even referring someone cause all you see is the price yet aren’t considering the opportunity cost of not fixing your pagespeed for your future revenue.

Well, I'm glad you're the new you, because I appreciate you weighing in and sharing some insight.

Solution: Get 8-10 quotes on fixing the pagespeed. Throw out the lowest quotes cause those clowns are inexperienced. Then negotiated to only pay after you see the before and after pagespeeds for the top 10-20 pages have improved. You have to take the before screenshots.

This is what I'm going to do, thank you. Any recommendations on platforms? Is upwork worth the time? Arc.dev? Reddit even?

Not that it matters at this point, but you've also made some assumptions that are not correct.

Trust me, if a developer tells you they are too busy it is because you are paying too little or don’t appreciate their work and low ball them.

Maybe your developer really is too busy, but my gut as a developer myself tells me it is more so they don’t want to work with you anymore. Why? Probably lowballing them or lack of appreciation.

Afterwards send your old developer some gift like some rum or wine. Them knowing your project in and out literally would cut down potential development time, get them back.

I never lowballed my developer because I never negotiated with him. I had two things I wanted him to do: 1) Move me to a new theme, and 2) Improve my page speed. He told me the cost and I agreed to it both times. I had done some looking around on Upwork at what other similar looking projects were going for, plus knew what I was able to spend given my income. He quoted lower than that so I agreed. In both instances he did exactly what I wanted (as far as I knew, being that this is obviously not my area of expertise), so in both instances I tipped him 10 - 15% upon completion and that took the cost to what I was willing and able to spend.

I don't know if he just doesn't want to work with me anymore - he said he's booked out for the next couple months. You could be right. Off the back of this convo, I'm going to ask him for some feedback and see what I get.

Either way you still have your head in the sand and your problem will continue to persist until it is way too late for anyone to help you.

I'm here admitting my error and looking at how I can fix it, right? I will be fixing this problem, one way or another.

...then you said $2k was “surprising”, I lost interest in helping or even referring someone cause all you see is the price ...

I probably could have added some more detail here: When I contacted them, all I got back was an email saying hey thanks for reaching out, our page speed service starts at $2k and here's our calendar to book in a chat. Nothing else. That's way more than my dev charged me (the only experience I've had with optimization services) and all they had was my url. I was just surprised that a figure like that could come from seemingly nowhere. What if all that's happening is some settings on my plugins are screwy, or some other simple fix?

Here's an analogy from an area of my expertise. You've been feeling low, having some persistent negative thoughts, lethargic and unmotivated. It's been going on a while and so you decide you'd better go see a professional. So you search on the net for a psychologist or psychiatrist near you. You call them up and tell them your symptoms and that you want to see someone. They say no problems, it's going to cost you at least $5k. Really?

You would rightly be surprised that a number could be thrown out without so much as a discussion and some diagnosis of what the problem actually is. What if you've just got an iron deficiency that's coinciding with a normal 'blue' period. You're going to pay $5k for a recommendation to eat more iron-rich foods, and to then wait and see if you feel better?

In that situation, you're me and the psych is the people I contacted.

Anyway, I genuinely appreciate you sharing your thoughts. And while I clearly look like a bozo to some people here, I honestly feel like I'm making progress off the back of these parlays.

If you click on the First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint headings, they will give you an outline of what they mean. (TLDR: FCP means the time until the first item appears on the page and LCP the time until most of the content appears - both are substantial in your case.)

To give you a comparison, I have a site which has a number of external scripts on it (FB pixel, Google Analytics, Google Maps, cookie consent) which I haven't particularly optimised for speed. Currently the mobile is 64 and desktop 86 for Page Speed Insights (OK to mediocre).

My FCP: 1.181 Your FCP: 3.694
My LCP: 1.647 Your LCP: 4.661
My Document Complete: 3.815 Your Document Complete: 15.847

Easy wins for you (or a dev): have a look further down the Page Speed Insights page under the Opportunity heading and see which, if any, you could implement.

Ok, well if it wasn't clear already, it's clear now that I have a problem. Thanks for taking the time, it's been very helpful.

basically this. It’s certainly not impossible to fix but it requires a deep understanding of how shit works not only on the application frontend level (wp + php) but also on server backend level (caching,dns,cdn etc) behind the scenes. You can spend the next 6 mo - 1 year trying to understand and implement properly or just pay someone todo the work right.

ive been able to take bloated 8-15 second wp load times down to 2-3 seconds even with 25+ plugins and multiple page builders like elementor running simultaneously.

wordpress is a double edged sword.

Thanks for weighing in. I know that I can't fix this myself in any reasonable time frame, so I'm on the hunt for a good dev.

 

[CCarter]

They say no problems, it's going to cost you at least $5k.

One involves going through thousands of lines of code, files, and figuring out what the problem is, another one involves talking to someone for what 30-60 mins. If your gut tells you something is off get multiple quotes and see what the market is. If 5 other professionals tell me ranges of $2-8k then that is the market price. Now I know.

Your developer who you worked with, exchanged money with, suddenly is too busy? That’s like your girlfriend/wife or friends suddenly saying they are too busy. Something is off.

There are people that I’ve taken on as clients that I just prefer never to take their money or talk to ever again. They could try to give me a million dollar contract and I still wouldn’t take their money. It happens.

I don’t know your situation I am just telling they are avoiding you for some reason. Maybe it was the price, they lowballed themselves and then regretted it later. I’ve done that gave a discount or bonus to someone then really regretted it later on. Maybe it was the working condition in your. I don’t know, but in the end they are avoiding you for some reason.

Really think about it, who avoids money? No one unless there was a problem.

 

[ToffeeLa]

And while I clearly look like a bozo to some people here, I honestly feel like I'm making progress off the back of these parlays.

Not at all. Even though it might not sound like it at times, people are generally trying to help (and have often been in the same situation themselves).

 

[DanSkippy]

@Maudiggity Let me first add a BIG disclaimer: All assumptions are based on the WP install having the latest version of WP and PHP v7.0 and greater.

If I where you I'd begin with a full site backup and proceded to kill the Word Stats plugin. This plugin isn't updated in almost 6 years.

Some problems with it:

$word_stats_options = Word_Stats_Core::load_options();
...
...
public function load_options() {
...
...
// Should be:
public static function load_options() {
...
...

// Another problem
class widget_ws_word_counts extends WP_Widget {
    function widget_ws_word_counts() {
    ...
    ...

// Should use a constructor in WP 4.3+
class widget_ws_word_counts extends WP_Widget {
    public function __construct() {
    ...
    ...

// F.Y.I; All public functions in the plugin are non-static.

The above examples can't be blamed completely for your site being slow, but they could contribute. I say could, because I don't know if your server setup logs the errors (?->!) and if logrotate is configured and if so, how.

But for arguments sake let's assume it does, then it could very well be that your server is slowed down because of a massive buildup of log files. One would think that your hostingservice would reach out, but I've had clients in the past on shared servers with 4.8GB of error logs and 5GB of webspace...

My other suggestion is to kill WordFence. At least temporarily and see what this gives you.

If you decide to try the above suggestions out, make sure to purge the caches on both WP Total Cache and Autoptimize. (Maybe also try and temp disable WP Total Cache.)

Again, and I can't stress this enough. Perform a complete backup first, and store this backup somewhere save on your PC/Mac/AWS_S3/Wasabi/::whatever_else_there_is_that_you_use() storage system.

But in the end it wouldn't be a bad idea to hire somebody with experience. And like all things in my posts; I'm only repeating bigger and better minds.

Hope you'll get this one fixed soon!

 

[Ryuzaki]

When I visit the pages in real-time though, they appear to load quickly and can be interacted with straight away.

This is probably because you have the pages' resources cached in your own browser, so they seem fast to you.

As far as your plugins go:

• Elementor
• Elementor Pro
• Element Pack
• Simple Social Share

These are likely your main culprits to having a bunch of render-blocking CSS and JS files. Render-blocking CSS and JS are the enemy of the metrics Google cares about, for the most part. Having as few of those as possible is a key to a good page speed (among other things).

A reason your developer might be dodging you is because he might think it's pointless. Like I described to you in our private messages, sometimes it's a lost cause and the only thing to do is start over. I'm NOT saying that's the case for you, but as a page speed specialist myself, even if I had the time, I'd be real hesitant to get involved with this site.

The reason is, the job hinges entirely on your willingness to get rid of a ton of these plugins, which means spending the time reformatting content, etc. Like... I can code you a custom social share setup that requires maybe 1 HTTP request, but that one you have installed probably has 20 at least and a bunch of crap you don't need like API calls, etc.

Some for the Elementor page building crap. I know I'm the bad guy on the forum for saying it, but nobody should be using those. Anybody who needs them should be disqualified from using them because they always go gung ho and destroy any chance of having a good page speed. And often by the time they realize it, they have 100's of pages that need to be recreated in a faster way.

So part of fixing that is getting you onto Gutenberg and then creating custom blocks to replace the fancy stuff you're doing with Elementor, etc. And now, instead of $2k for the job, we're starting to talk about $10k. And at that point you might as well just start over with a brand new theme designed with page speed in mind, and now we're talking $20k.

That's why I stopped accepting page speed clients. Who in their right mind is going to believe me when I upsell them from $2k to $20k? Very few people are going to bite that hook and get reeled in, even when it's 100% true.

And when they don't bite, I can take their Page Speed Insights score of 10 up to 40, which is a great success but still an abysmal score, and it's my fault and not theirs, because they didn't want to uninstall some plugins they got married to or use a theme that's not bloated.

Hopefully that gives you some insight into what might be going on with your developer and how flexible you might need to become if you really want to fix this problem.

I'm pretty sure the 700+ requests made has something to do with the speed

That's probably from the display ads. If I had to guess, that's Sovrn, either directly or through some other network or exchange. But they're the only ones I know that do that because they aren't just an display ad company but a data harvester and pixel dropper by the boatloads.

But those ads are probably at least loading asynchronously and shouldn't be blocking rendering. They're all probably trickling in on the waterfall well after the rest of the page is loaded.

 

[janky]

My limitations were removed, so it's showtime

The things you need for a quick load time:
1) Fast (Optimized) Server
2) Lightweight theme and only use absolutely necessary plugins

So the first questions:
- Which hosting are you using? Hopefully not shared hosting. (You definitely need to work on this if it's shit)
I recommend Linode or DigitalOcean and if you want to easily manage the installs use cloudways.
- What theme are you using? (I wouldn't change that, as it might cause issues)
My personal favorite is Astra and Genesis.

The biggest issue which is clearly visible is the 700 Requests. You need to work on that first.

If your hosting and your theme are decent, the next thing you should look at are the plugins.
Remove all the unnecessary plugins!
Looking at your plugins, I can see some issues.

Why do you have so many optimization plugins? It just doesn't make sense.
You have Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, Javascript Optimization, Web Font Optimization.
Having so many plugins for optimization can cause issues/bottlenecks (between the plugins) and can cause even higher load time.
My favorite optimization plugin is Wp-Rocket. It can do what those 4 plugins are doing + more.

Last year I bought a website that had a horrible 4.5-sec TTFB (time to first byte) and a 6 seconds load time.
I installed WP-Rocket on it, imported my usual settings and the TTFB became 0.3 sec, and the load time to 1.5 sec.
All this happened before I moved the website to my hosting.
I have no idea what was causing the huge TTFB, but this plugin fixed it.
I fixed a few onpage issues after that and the pages popped from page3 to page1. Google definitely loved what I did.

Anyways, the point is having so many optimization plugins can cause more issues.
I've tested other optimization plugins too, but Wp-Rocket was the best. The second best one was Autoptimize.
Definitely get that one, tick almost all the boxes and you're good to go.

Why do you have Yoast SEO and Google XML Sitemaps too?
Can't Yoast create a sitemap for you?
I mean I'm using RankMath, so I have no idea if it can, but probably XML sitemaps is unnecessary too.

Is Updraft plus really necessary?
Even the shitties hosting companies are creating daily backups.
Well, at least even that $3.5/month shared hosting had backups when I fcked up my site once.

Another issue as Ryuzaki mentioned is Elementor.
It will add 0.5-1.5 sec to the load time.
I have it on almost all my sites though and my sites still load in 1.5-3 seconds.
If I remove it the load time is ~1 sec with 10 active plugins, so yeah.
Anyway, your website can still load still quite fast with Elementor, but it will definitely affect your load times.
If Elementor is active expect a 15-20 lower score on the mobile test.

I think if you fix all the issues I mentioned above you can get your website load time down to max 5 seconds which is decent.

If you (or anyone) needs help with site speed let me know.
I can help you out with some tips (please only sites you care about, so we don't waste each others time for nothing).

Hope this helps.

 

[Maudiggity]

One involves going through thousands of lines of code, files, and figuring out what the problem is, another one involves talking to someone for what 30-60 mins. If your gut tells you something is off get multiple quotes and see what the market is. If 5 other professionals tell me ranges of $2-8k then that is the market price. Now I know.

Exactly. Like I said in another comment, I asked them what was involved. No response yet.

Your developer who you worked with, exchanged money with, suddenly is too busy? That’s like your girlfriend/wife or friends suddenly saying they are too busy. Something is off.

Really think about it, who avoids money? No one unless there was a problem.

I agree. It's a moot point for this specific developer now as he's said no. I've asked him for some feedback, so I guess we'll see.

Not at all. Even though it might not sound like it at times, people are generally trying to help (and have often been in the same situation themselves).

I appreciate the help

My limitations were removed, so it's showtime

The things you need for a quick load time:
1) Fast (Optimized) Server
2) Lightweight theme and only use absolutely necessary plugins

So the first questions:
- Which hosting are you using? Hopefully not shared hosting. (You definitely need to work on this if it's shit)
I recommend Linode or DigitalOcean and if you want to easily manage the installs use cloudways.
- What theme are you using? (I wouldn't change that, as it might cause issues)
My personal favorite is Astra and Genesis.

The biggest issue which is clearly visible is the 700 Requests. You need to work on that first.

If your hosting and your theme are decent, the next thing you should look at are the plugins.
Remove all the unnecessary plugins!
Looking at your plugins, I can see some issues.

Why do you have so many optimization plugins? It just doesn't make sense.
You have Autoptimize, W3 Total Cache, Javascript Optimization, Web Font Optimization.
Having so many plugins for optimization can cause issues/bottlenecks (between the plugins) and can cause even higher load time.
My favorite optimization plugin is Wp-Rocket. It can do what those 4 plugins are doing + more.

Last year I bought a website that had a horrible 4.5-sec TTFB (time to first byte) and a 6 seconds load time.
I installed WP-Rocket on it, imported my usual settings and the TTFB became 0.3 sec, and the load time to 1.5 sec.
All this happened before I moved the website to my hosting.
I have no idea what was causing the huge TTFB, but this plugin fixed it.
I fixed a few onpage issues after that and the pages popped from page3 to page1. Google definitely loved what I did.

Anyways, the point is having so many optimization plugins can cause more issues.
I've tested other optimization plugins too, but Wp-Rocket was the best. The second best one was Autoptimize.
Definitely get that one, tick almost all the boxes and you're good to go.

Why do you have Yoast SEO and Google XML Sitemaps too?
Can't Yoast create a sitemap for you?
I mean I'm using RankMath, so I have no idea if it can, but probably XML sitemaps is unnecessary too.

Is Updraft plus really necessary?
Even the shitties hosting companies are creating daily backups.
Well, at least even that $3.5/month shared hosting had backups when I fcked up my site once.

Another issue as Ryuzaki mentioned is Elementor.
It will add 0.5-1.5 sec to the load time.
I have it on almost all my sites though and my sites still load in 1.5-3 seconds.
If I remove it the load time is ~1 sec with 10 active plugins, so yeah.
Anyway, your website can still load still quite fast with Elementor, but it will definitely affect your load times.
If Elementor is active expect a 15-20 lower score on the mobile test.

I think if you fix all the issues I mentioned above you can get your website load time down to max 5 seconds which is decent.

If you (or anyone) needs help with site speed let me know.
I can help you out with some tips (please only sites you care about, so we don't waste each others time for nothing).

Hope this helps.

All of your comments about the plugins are valid, and questions I myself asked of the much discussed developer. He moved me to Elementor. He installed the optimisation plugins, except for w3, as well as yoast. All the rest I installed as I was learning... I asked if they were fine to keep and he said yes.

At risk of repeating myself, this isn't my area of expertise so I trusted he knew what he was doing.

I'm on shared hosting with siteground.
I'm using some standard theme recommended by the Dev along with Elementor.

If you (or anyone) needs help with site speed let me know.
I can help you out with some tips (please only sites you care about, so we don't waste each others time for nothing).

Thanks for the offer. Clearly I need more than just tips though.

This is probably because you have the pages' resources cached in your own browser, so they seem fast to you.

I cleared my cache, tried on my wife's new phone that had never visited the site, tried on a work device that had never visited the site, and even installed a new browser on my computer. Same thing with all. Seems like it loads quickly to me.

A reason your developer might be dodging you is because he might think it's pointless. Like I described to you in our private messages, sometimes it's a lost cause and the only thing to do is start over. I'm NOT saying that's the case for you, but as a page speed specialist myself, even if I had the time, I'd be real hesitant to get involved with this site.

It's all speculation at this point, who knows what's going on with him. If I do have to start over, then so be it.

The reason is, the job hinges entirely on your willingness to get rid of a ton of these plugins, which means spending the time reformatting content, etc. Like... I can code you a custom social share setup that requires maybe 1 HTTP request, but that one you have installed probably has 20 at least and a bunch of crap you don't need like API calls, etc.

I'm not married to any plugin, ever. I don't know enough about them or how they work for that kind of attachment. As for the rest, I'm very much hoping it won't cost me $20k, but if anything, this thread has made me realise I will need to unclench my butt checks...

But those ads are probably at least loading asynchronously and shouldn't be blocking rendering. They're all probably trickling in on the waterfall well after the rest of the page is loaded.

I believe this is the case, yes.

 

[janky]

All of your comments about the plugins are valid, and questions I myself asked of the much discussed developer. He moved me to Elementor. He installed the optimisation plugins, except for w3, as well as yoast. All the rest I installed as I was learning... I asked if they were fine to keep and he said yes.

At risk of repeating myself, this isn't my area of expertise so I trusted he knew what he was doing.

I'm on shared hosting with siteground.
I'm using some standard theme recommended by the Dev along with Elementor.

Thanks for the offer. Clearly I need more than just tips though.

Siteground shared hosting is not the best solution, but TBH it's one of the best shared hosting out there.
I would still move to a dedicated server (I moved one of my websites yesterday and it took like 15 minutes), but if you want to keep on using that hosting, it's one of the better ones out there. You can get a decent score with Siteground.
Which theme is that? I have a feeling that it's a bloated theme with a lot of unnecessary crap.

Can I be totally honest with you?

I think a developer who installs 3 more optimization plugins when you already have one (and keeps the old one too) really doesn't know what he is doing. Why would someone who knows what he is doing use 4 optimization plugins at the same time? It just doesn't make sense. I really think he doesn't know a thing about website optimization/speed.

I've tinkered with optimization plugins for 2 days last year to find the winning combo. After 100+ speed tests on 3 sites, 3 different hostings, 7 optimization plugins, the conclusion was that it's not worth using multiple plugins for it. WP-Rocket is enough and is the fastest way. Having so many optimization plugins is like installing 4 antiviruses at the same time. It will be a bottleneck and eat a lot of resources for nothing.

Also, you can ask the guys around here, but IMO a decent/good developer doesn't use Elementor. The reason why I use Elementor is because it's easy to use and you don't need any developer skills to use it. It's idiot-proof. Elementor is not bad, I've recommended it to friends because it's easy to use, but a real developer should not use Elementor.

He probably noticed that you're a beginner and took advantage of that. I'm not sure if I should ask this but is he from one of the "scammier" third world countries?
From what you are telling us about the optimization plugins + Elementor it's either that or he noticed that you're a beginner and took advantage and used the lazy way.

I would NOT use this guy again.

 

[Maudiggity]

Siteground shared hosting is not the best solution, but TBH it's one of the best shared hosting out there.
I would still move to a dedicated server (I moved one of my websites yesterday and it took like 15 minutes), but if you want to keep on using that hosting, it's one of the better ones out there. You can get a decent score with Siteground.
Which theme is that? I have a feeling that it's a bloated theme with a lot of unnecessary crap.

Can I be totally honest with you?

I think a developer who installs 3 more optimization plugins when you already have one (and keeps the old one too) really doesn't know what he is doing. Why would someone who knows what he is doing use 4 optimization plugins at the same time? It just doesn't make sense. I really think he doesn't know a thing about website optimization/speed.

I've tinkered with optimization plugins for 2 days last year to find the winning combo. After 100+ speed tests on 3 sites, 3 different hostings, 7 optimization plugins, the conclusion was that it's not worth using multiple plugins for it. WP-Rocket is enough and is the fastest way. Having so many optimization plugins is like installing 4 antiviruses at the same time. It will be a bottleneck and eat a lot of resources for nothing.

Also, you can ask the guys around here, but IMO a decent/good developer doesn't use Elementor. The reason why I use Elementor is because it's easy to use and you don't need any developer skills to use it. It's idiot-proof. Elementor is not bad, I've recommended it to friends because it's easy to use, but a real developer should not use Elementor.

He probably noticed that you're a beginner and took advantage of that. I'm not sure if I should ask this but is he from one of the "scammier" third world countries?
From what you are telling us about the optimization plugins + Elementor it's either that or he noticed that you're a beginner and took advantage and used the lazy way.

The theme is Hello.

He's Eastern European. Top rated on Upwork, $30k+ earned through the platform at the time, lots of very positive reviews. Not the cheapest, but not the most expensive.

He may well have taken advantage of me, however he did what I wanted and got my site to the state it was in when it was at the peak of its earnings.

I would NOT use this guy again.

Roger that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.

 

[southpaw]

For any reason, if you want to stay with shared hosting, I recommend trying one with Litespeed servers. I use Litespeed shared hosting services for a few reasons:

1. The Litespeed cache plugin

The BuSo Crash Course covers site speed optimizations for apache and nginx servers. I do not know much about servers and am therefore cautious about fiddling with htaccess files. Litespeed's plugin is an easier approach- install, check a few boxes in the WP dashboard, and done.

2. Backups included

As @janky mentioned, many hosting providers include backup services. When my site died on me, I sent an email to support and they put back a snapshot from three days before.

This was easier than figuring out UpDraftPlus on a WP install where my wp-login page blocked me out, quoting a database error message.

3. Fantastic Support

Ticket-based support has fixed every problem within 4 hours. I suppose it would be faster if I set priority to high or critical, but such a problem has not yet happened.


Also, on images. Passing images through Squoosh (single images) or ImageOptim (a folder of images) to optimize them before uploading could replace your Image Optimizer plugin.

 

[CaptainHustle]

For any reason, if you want to stay with shared hosting, I recommend trying one with Litespeed servers. I use Litespeed shared hosting services for a few reasons:

This sounds really good. Mind sharing the name of your hosting? Is your site really bare in terms of plugins and theme?

 

[Maudiggity]

Just thought I'd share an update in case anyone was wondering what happened here:

I immediately started looking for a dev to assess what was going on with my site. I put job listings up in a few places with the intent to do what CCarter suggested: Get 8 or so quotes, throw out the cheapest and talk to the most expensive until I found one I was comfortable with. I even tried to find a wordpress dev in my own city so I could do a face-to-face with them.

No luck.

Pretty much no one even responded to my job posts. There's obviously some learnings in there for me on how attractive I was making the job appear, which was apparently not very (in case you're wondering, I kept the info minimal - "looking for a wordpress dev to assess my site and why it's so slow, and implement necessary fixes" or something along those line).

So I went looking on Upwork for people who advertise themselves as optimization specialists, and have lots of good reviews. I approached a guy, he took the work and within about 8 hours he had deactivated all of my optimization plugins, installed and configured WP Rocket, done a few other things, and vastly improved my page speed scores according to the usual tools. It cost me far less than $2k.

These are screenshots from just now of the same internal page I used in the original post:

The guy who did it said it was an issue primarily of too many optimization plugins, not configured properly, and shared hosting being a bit slow (I have subsequently moved my site to Digital Ocean via cloudways). I know the GPSI score is still pretty poop, and that has probably got to do with the elementor page builder and my theme.

That all happened on 25 September. Up until about 10 days ago, I had been losing traffic steadily. Around the start of the month, that trend reversed, and I my traffic is now increasing again. GSC is showing a slight uptick in rankings. Impossible to say if that is a result of this work, but I am certainly glad.

Thanks to @Ryuzaki @janky @FIREman @ToffeeLa @CCarter @maximus and @DanSkippy for your contributions and feedback; you were super helpful and I appreciate you taking the time to have some input, even if I didn't love hearing everything that was said.

As a side note: A developer reached out to me a couple days ago seeing if I still needed help. We got chatting and hit it off. He's turned out to be a very experienced wordpress dev and I've asked him to be my guy long term and start with reviewing and recommending where optimizations can still be made. We had our first video call today where he walked me through SSHing into my server and checking how everything is working (which I asked for, to help me learn a bit more about managing the server). I've got a good feeling about this, and will NOT be lowballing him .

 

[janky]

@Maudiggity

Happy to see it worked out for you.
From 10+ sec load time and 700 requests down to ~3 sec and 21 requests, that's awesome.