I was just trying out this "new" tool to determine how mobile friendly a site is according to Google and when I run one of my pages, the results come back with a load speed of 75/100. the tool states there is one error and one potential problem that I have no idea how to fix. The error is: Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content and the potential problem is: Leverage browser caching I have been doing some reading on these things and their seems to be varying opinions as to whether to trust these results. Are these issues something I should be concerned with? Thanks . . .
Somewhat. Shoot us a link. Browser caching bit is an easy fix. This tool is a bit more helpful as well https://gtmetrix.com This goes in your .htaccess file ## EXPIRES CACHING ## <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" </IfModule> ## EXPIRES CACHING ## hope that helps, Nigel
Just be warned that a LOT of what Google's "pagespeed insights" suggests now and penalizes sites for is 100% grade A farm fresh BULLSHIT that is little more than them trying to dupe people into buying their pagespeed "service" or to shell out for one of the CDN's they advertise for. They pulled a bit of a bait and switch on us. Instead of presenting the useful information it did five years ago, they've dumbed it down -- they no longer even show "average page speeds" since that was what allowed us to point out it was bullshit... in the past when they showed the time you knew they were full of it when they'd give 100/100 to sites that took two minutes to load and 50/100 to sites that loaded in two seconds... You have a classic example of this in the "leverage browser caching" idiocy. Basically what they are saying is to dick with the cache-control headers as Nigel pointed out -- this is hoodoo-voodoo BULLSHIT that makes the crazy assumption that browser cache is big enough to hold everything forever, that there's something wrong with the default behavior of the browsers, and that for space reasons given the raw size of todays websites that browsers won't invalidate by access time for space reasons. It's gibberish nonsense and a waste of time for 99% of websites if you just keep your sizes under control in the first place... and if your sizes are out of control, it's gonna get flushed by the browser anyways -- cache-control headings aren't gonna fix that! Well unless the user sets their browser cache to half a gig... and nobody does that. It's like when they bitch about minification -- another bit of hoodoo voodoo that if it saves you more than 5% when serving non gzipped there's something wrong with your code... and if you're not serving gzipped then you screwed up! Admittedly some spiders are too stupid to handle gzip compression, but those shouldn't be the lions share of your traffic. Minification (aka whitespace stripping) is just a technique for sweeping sloppy coding practices under the rug. Though admittedly, people who slop out 100k of markup to do 16k's job, 500k of scripttardery to do 16k's job, and 250k of CSS to do 16k's job are the target audience for the halfwit dumbass idiocy that is minification. With pagespeed insights given the outright ignorant nonsense they're telling people, I consider anything over an 80 to be fine. They penalize pages for absolute rubbish nonsensical reasons now, and it has been that way ever since they introduced their scam artist "service" that makes crappy sites mediocre and well written sites slower. Five or six years ago? useful tool... Today? Dumbed down scam artist BULLSHIT. Again, they pulled a bait and switch.
As always, thanks for weighing in on this deathshadow. I really was hoping that this was nothing to worry about and the more I read about it and looked at their results, the less comfortable I was with what it was showing. So I guess its time to move on the next thing that I am sure will come up in the next few days. LOL Thanks again for all the input . . .