Yestereday I posted in this group about reducing ‘initial server response time’. At the time I made the post, I was getting pagespeed insight score as below:
Performance: 60-70 Accessibility:100 Best Practices:100 and SEO: 100. I wanted to improve performance to 85+ and leave it there as it’s more than sufficient IMO. There were three major reasons for the drop in performance:
1. High initial server response time
2. As I started adding more scripts in GTM (total 5), third party scripts increased the blocking time
3. As TBT was going high, so was TTI.
4. LCP and FCP were a bit high
5. I checked server status with Vultr and found my VPS data center had high congestion all the time.
I started with reducing high response time. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t budge. So, I posted in various groups to get more insights about the problem.
Simultaneously, I started working on other factors till I got responses from group members.
Today, I implemented almost all the tactics suggested by others; except reviewing core code for bottleneck. There is minor improvement of 50ms to 100 ms (original delay was between 800 to 900ms). So, I am assuming the problem is either in the network, server or the code.
Meanwhile as my work on other factors finished, performance reached between 96-99 for inner pages and 93-95 for homepage. It is more than I hoped. But funny thing is, server response time is still the same. I am leaving it there as it is no more a hurdle. I’ll see it in future if it again becomes the problem.
This is what I did from yesterday that caused the overall improvement in score:
1. Changed the datacenter location
2. Increased concurrent connections limit in CFS firewall for SSL port on my VPS
3. Reduced image sizes by at least 20%. Previously average size was 100-120kb.
4. Added delay to GTM and moved its code to bottom at the end of the body tag. Played with the triggers for third party scripts in GTM till I got the balance between TBT and data collection.
5. Optimized settings in LS cache
6. Added page rule for cache in cloudflare
These are major things that contributed in the improvement. Apart from these, I did some minor tweakings:
7. Changed the order of CSS files
8. Removed redundant classes
9. Replaced querySelector from my JS code with more specific selector like getElementByID
I hope it helps someone facing similar problem.
Thanks to the community for the support.