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I left WP ecosystem since Elementor/ WP Bakery/ Visual Composer got popular. The amount of bloat code they generate on your front + how they abuse a single DB field to cram in all sorts of shortcodes and adds a ton of overhead transforming them on each page load is insane (leaving optimization to your cache setup & cache control headers)
I didn't know avif, good stuff! Still your solution may be a bit overkill no? Wouldn't a) running an image compression script on the wp-content/uploads folders and b) adding a WP plugin that compresses image files on upload, be a cleaner solution long-term? -
@webketje We don't have any trouble with bandwidth, so converting it all to avif is not really needed.It's more of a wishlist item.
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I've spent hours working on this phantom performance issue. I test with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge and they all load nearly instantly now. Same with curl.
But when their tool scans the site, I get 3 or 4 second load times in the report. lighthouse is about the same. They tell me that the time to first byte around 2 to 3 seconds, but that's not happening in any way I can observe.
I feel like I'm missing something. -
Since it takes wordpress itself seconds to load no matter what I do, I decided to set up nginx caching and crawl the entire site and see how that works out.
With limited testing, the times go from 2+ seconds to .2 seconds. I can't image this is scalable, but I really need to prove it's even possible.
A blackbox seo tool that was made by aliens we use says that a couple of our WordPress sites are loading very slowly, so I enable caching through nginx and increase the resources available to them through high capacity fpm pools. They scan again and almost nothing has changed with the page load score.
So I look in lighthouse, which I just learned about, and I find that several of the pages have several MB size images. So that means I'll have to mogrify the entire uploads directory to try to get the size down.
It also suggests I use avif to save a ton of data, which I'm torn on. I hate downloading an image and it not being a normal format that everything can open. But my sites are not image sharing sites, so it's a lot less annoying to the user since they will never realize they're getting an avif. That also means I will have to redo all the image links to point to the avif instead of the original, which sounds like the least fun activity ever.
Another thing that I keep seeing is that Elementor is just slow and slow page loads are part of the deal. If we have to scrap Elementor, that means I will have to be more involved in developing the WordPress sites and I really don't want to.
rant