Improve Site Performance by Removing/Replacing Widgets & Plugins?

[Kingalan1]

We completed a Wordpress redesign of our website in December. The project took about 8 months. Important URLs on the new site are performing slowly according to Google Page Speed Insights. For instance, a key product page gets a score of 18 on mobile and 61 on desktop. Home page scores 37 on mobile and 80 on desktop.

My new SEO believes the website is hindered by an excessive number of plugins and widgets. That reducing the number of these may increase performance. Also, my developers were unable to get WT3 Total Cache to work with our InMotion server and have used about 3 plugins for cache.

We purchased a real estate theme (wpcasa) and heavily customized it. Any suggestions for improveing performance? If we recoded the website from scratch without a pre existing theme (using the existing design) would that speed up performance? Is there anything we can do remove complexity and improve URL download speeds? We are in a very competitive niche and we need decent performance in order to rank.

Thanks, 
Alan

[CJolicoeur]

There are numerous aspects that go into page speed.

When you run an analysis, whether in Pingdom, GTMetrix, or Google Page Speed, you will get insights about what is slowing down your site. These are the aspects you want to focus on. The best I find is GTMetrix. It gives you a step by step list of everything slowing down your site. Then, you can research each point and find ways to improve them. That said, here are a few areas to check:

1. Are you running the highest version of Wordpress and PHPadmin. You want at least 7.0 or higher for PHP admin, and you want to be using Wordpress 5.0.

2. Your server speed and the quality of your host will play a bigger role than anything else in the speed of your site. Check with your hosting company if your server can handle your site. With hosting, quality is a lot more important than price. You can get cheap, shared hosting from an unreliable supplier, but you will get the site speed that goes with it. You want a server that's located in the country where most of your traffic will come from, and you never want it to be "just good enough". It's like towing with a truck. If you need to tow 5,000 pounds, you'll want a truck that can tow at least 7,500 pounds with ease. Not sure if that makes sense, but the point is, make sure your server is capable of towing a lot more than your current site.

If you're not sure which hosts are best, do some online research. I won't name names here, but there are 3 or 4 hosting companies that are constantly head and shoulders above the rest.

3. Your images also play a huge role in your site speed. Make sure they are optimized. Again, Page Speed and GTMetrix will let you know how big of a role your images are playing in your slow site.

4. Research Leverage Browser Caching.

5. Research "slow wordpress site". There is a guide available that helps you go step by step to improve speed.

Site speed is a range of factors. There can be hundreds of factors hurting your site but the four above are the major ones. Don't worry too much about your theme. It plays a role, but no theme can be fast if the host is slow, the images are too big, you don't enable Leverage Browser Caching and your Wordpress and PHP versions aren't up to date.

As for your plugins, there is a plugin that checks which of your plugins are slowing down your site the most called P3, but I wouldn't recommend it. It caused a few problems on our site when we ran it. That said, the rule of thumb with plugins is delete anything you don't use, don't use two plugins that do the same thing, and make sure you use reliable plugins that have good reviews and are updated regularly.