Hi All. I am managing our WordPress site and I am fairly new with WordPress specifically for the last 2 years. At one point our desktop site score was hitting 50 on google insights and 30 for mobile. I have been implementing some changes to raise the mobile score as I was able to get the desktop score up to 80+.
I suspected our menu was slowing down the site as we were using 3 different plugins for the mobile and desktop menu. We redesigned it with just 1 and I saw the mobile score jump to about a 50 from 30 and Desktop is mid 80’s.
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We recently just upgraded the hosting server on flywheel from 1 CPU worker to 12. I didn’t see any sort of improvement in our score and that is costing us an additional $75 a month. I may reverse this.
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I’ve also tried removing all the designs on the homepage in mobile to see if anything in the design was causing slow down. It improved the score by 5 having no elements loaded in mobile.
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I have a few questions.
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1. Are there any suggestions on specifically raising the mobile score without rebuilding the site from the ground up? I went through each of our plugins and disabled them one at a time to see what might be causing a hit and so far it was really just the menu plugins that we changed.
2. This website is our lead generation website. We are a small company and we get about 10 – 15 leads a month. Last month we got about 14k visits. How much effort is it worth to raise our insights score up for SEO purposes. We use Rank math for SEO and we rank on the first page of Google and Rank Math indicates most of our SEO hits 80 – 100 on all of our pages. GTMetrix ranks us a B in terms of testing and 89% speed score. I’m trying to figure out where the priority for our site should go. Improving speed ranking, maybe more towards SEO or ad spending? Is it worth rebuilding our site to rank very high in mobile? We receive about 60 desktop 40 mobile users percentage wise. We do use WPRocket for caching / CDN / Optimization, and it has had a modest impact since its implementation.
3. Also, to note, we are still on PHP Version 7.4, and any time I upgrade, it breaks the site so I suspect it will take some effort to solve the upgrade. How important is spending time on upgrading to the latest PHP? I understand security is always an issue, and I am trying to gauge how to present this to my manager. Is this important enough to prioritize immediately?
4. Ultimately, I’m looking for some advice on what elements in running the website are most important to dedicate resources to. Is the insights score a big enough issue that we should go after that? We do produce a lot of content for our site in terms of a blog and YouTube videos. We do pretty well on YouTube in marketing, with 1500 – 2000 visitors a month and we are slowly growing. Should we push for more content as priority? Maybe more eBooks / case studies / infographics? What are suggestions that would make the biggest impact in order of priority?
Thank you!
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**What we are using:**
Hosting: Flywheel
FP0+:
100K visits
25GB Storage
250GB Bandwidth
Custom Small CPU server with 12 Workers
**Upgraded from**
24k Visits
5GB Storage
50GB Bandwidth
Tiny Server 1 worker
**Plugins**
Page Builder – Elementor and Elementor Pro with add-ons.
Theme – Custom Astra.
Plugins:
Apptivo Bussiness Plugin
Astra Pro
Classic Editor
Classic Widgets
CMS Tree Page View
CookieYes GDPR
Custom CSS for Elementor
Disable Comments
Duplicate Page
Elementor
Elementor Pro
Flywheel Migrations
Google Language Translator
Head & Footer Code
Imagify
ManageWP – Worker
MMenu – app look-alike menu
Rank Math SEO PRO
Responsive Menu Pro
Redirection
Schema
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
Strong Testimonials
UberMenu 3
Ultimate Addons for Elementor
WordFence Security
WP Engine Site Migration
WP File Manager
WP Rocket
WPCode lite
WPS Hide Login
​
**Here are some of my mobile numbers in insights:**
LCP – 6.8s
CLS – .19
FCP – 6.7s
TTFB – 4.4s
**Eliminate Render Blocking Resources – 3.25s**
[…block-library/style.min.css?ver=6.3.2](https://www.readytech.com/wp-includes/css/dist/block-library/style.min.css?ver=6.3.2))16.9 KiB
170 ms
[…css/cookie-law-info-gdpr.css?ver=3.1.7](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/cookie-law-info/legacy/public/css/cookie-law-info-gdpr.css?ver=3.1.7))5.8 KiB
170 ms
[…css/style.css?ver=6.0.19](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/google-language-translator/css/style.css?ver=6.0.19)()12.4 KiB
170 ms
[…css/dashicons.min.css?ver=6.3.2](https://www.readytech.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=6.3.2)(36.5 KiB
840 ms
[…css/mmenu.css?ver=30](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/mmenu/css/mmenu.css?ver=30)10.0 KiB
340 ms
[…astra-addon/astra-addon-6555c112c1f767-97957566.css?ver=4.5.0](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/uploads/astra-addon/astra-addon-6555c112c1f767-97957566.css?ver=4.5.0)11.4 KiB
170 ms
[…css/frontend-lite.min.css?ver=3.17.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/css/frontend-lite.min.css?ver=3.17.3)16.8 KiB
170 ms
[…css/swiper.min.css?ver=5.3.6](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/lib/swiper/css/swiper.min.css?ver=5.3.6)3.3 KiB
170 ms
[…min-css/uael-frontend.min.css?ver=1.36.25](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-elementor/assets/min-css/uael-frontend.min.css?ver=1.36.25)86.4 KiB
670 ms
[…css/v4-shims.min.css?ver=3.17.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/lib/font-awesome/css/v4-shims.min.css?ver=3.17.3)5.3 KiB
170 ms
[…css/ubermenu.min.css?ver=3.6.0.1](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/ubermenu/pro/assets/css/ubermenu.min.css?ver=3.6.0.1)9.1 KiB
170 ms
[…css/fontawesome.min.css?ver=5.15.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/lib/font-awesome/css/fontawesome.min.css?ver=5.15.3)14.4 KiB
170 ms
[…jquery/jquery.min.js?ver=3.7.0](https://www.readytech.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js?ver=3.7.0)33.4 KiB
170 ms
[…js/mmenu.js?ver=30](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/mmenu/js/mmenu.js?ver=30)23.5 KiB
170 ms
Google Fonts
Cdn
**2.4 KiB**
**760 ms**
[/css?family=…](https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto%3A100%2C100italic%2C200%2C200italic%2C300%2C300italic%2C400%2C400italic%2C500%2C500italic%2C600%2C600italic%2C700%2C700italic%2C800%2C800italic%2C900%2C900italic%7CRoboto+Slab%3A100%2C100italic%2C200%2C200italic%2C300%2C300italic%2C400%2C400italic%2C500%2C500italic%2C600%2C600italic%2C700%2C700italic%2C800%2C800italic%2C900%2C900italic&display=swap&ver=6.3.2)(fonts.googleapis.com)2.4 KiB
760 ms
Cloudflare CDN
Cdn
**27.8 KiB**
**1,210 ms**
[…3.3.1/jquery.min.js](https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js)(cdnjs.cloudflare.com)27.8 KiB
1,210 ms
FontAwesome CDN
Cdn
**4.8 KiB**
**810 ms**
[/e90edb277c.js](https://kit.fontawesome.com/e90edb277c.js)(kit.fontawesome.com)4.8 KiB
810 ms
​
**Next Highest Reduce Unused CSS 2.18S**
[…min-css/uael-frontend.min.css?ver=1.36.25](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-elementor/assets/min-css/uael-frontend.min.css?ver=1.36.25)86.4 KiB
86.3 KiB
[…css/dashicons.min.css?ver=6.3.2](https://www.readytech.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=6.3.2)36.5 KiB
36.2 KiB
[…astra-child/style.css?ver=1.0](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/themes/astra-child/style.css?ver=1.0)29.2 KiB
29.2 KiB
[…block-library/style.min.css?ver=6.3.2](https://www.readytech.com/wp-includes/css/dist/block-library/style.min.css?ver=6.3.2)16.9 KiB
16.9 KiB
[…css/frontend-lite.min.css?ver=3.17.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/css/frontend-lite.min.css?ver=3.17.3)16.8 KiB
15.2 KiB
[…css/all.min.css?ver=3.17.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/lib/font-awesome/css/all.min.css?ver=3.17.3)14.7 KiB
14.6 KiB
[…css/fontawesome.min.css?ver=5.15.3](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/lib/font-awesome/css/fontawesome.min.css?ver=5.15.3)14.4 KiB
14.3 KiB
[…css/all.min.css?ver=6.3.2](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/ubermenu/assets/fontawesome/css/all.min.css?ver=6.3.2)13.9 KiB
13.8 KiB
[…css/style.css?ver=6.0.19](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/plugins/google-language-translator/css/style.css?ver=6.0.19)12.4 KiB
12.3 KiB
[…minified/style.min.css?ver=4.3.1](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/themes/astra/assets/css/minified/style.min.css?ver=4.3.1)14.3 KiB
12.2 KiB
[…astra-addon/astra-addon-6555c112c1f767-97957566.css?ver=4.5.0](https://www.readytech.com/wp-content/uploads/astra-addon/astra-addon-6555c112c1f767-97957566.css?ver=4.5.0)