I got a warning via Google Page Speed about my page load times. One of the suggestions is the following:
Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.
Don’t want to mention the theme I’m using, but its from a well respected and long time theme developer. Also using the latest RW with the latest version of Stacks and all the installed stacks are up to date.
Thoughts or advice? I’m not a web developer so this is over my head.
Most of the Page Speed “rules” are suggestions and some of these will be beyond your control. Focus on the ones you can change like images, compression, caching etc…
A lot themes have features built in that aren’t possible to deliver inline and most themes would “fail” at least one of the Page Speed suggestions. In fact most WordPress themes fail, and fail badly. One of the most popular WP themes is a crime against coding. But it’s popular because you can drag and drop everything, and all that functionality comes at the cost of breaking some “rules”.
I’ve never tested this, but I’ve heard more than once that Google’s websites fail their own tests. And, if you add YouTube videos or Google ads to your site, your Page Speed score will go down because adding code to certain parts of your website will break the rules.
As i said before, optimise everything you can and don’t worry about what you can’t. Just because the theme doesn’t score 100% doesn’t mean it’s badly built.
Thanks @NeilUK - You confirmed what I’d assumed about not having control over what the theme provides and this is the exact reason I didn’t want to unfairly mention the theme.
Totally agree about focusing on what I have control over. In hind site, I should have asked if this was something I could adjust or not. I’d assumed no, but wanted to make sure.
Also, your comment about Google failing their own test made me laugh. This is sort of an example of: I can make it fast for Google, but users will hate it or I can make it nice for viewers and not worry so much about Google. Just looking for low hanging fruit in this case.
I will say that some of the tips google gave me are quite helpful. For example, there are some images that snuck into my site that are very large PNG images that could easily be JPG without any noticeable loss to for the viewer.
What was also interesting was Google recommending JPEG2000. Sort of though that standard never got legs and died. Interesting to see that recommendation.