Genesis - I'm in a land of confusion... | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

Hi Guys

After reading lots of positive things about the Genesis Framework on the forum recently, I decided to splash out on the framework, together with a professional theme for Objective Wealth's 1st birthday – to give it a makeover. 

I love using the the framework, and I'm really pleased with the new look of my site, but I think there's a problem:

I checked out Google Pagespeed, expecting that all the "Optimised" features would give me just a little speed boost, but instead I've gone from a score of 86 (old free theme) to 36! (New Genesis theme) 

With another Pagerank update imminent I'm a bit concerned I'll be penalised thanks to my gorgeous new snail!

Any ideas? 

Hi Eric

Yes, I use W3 Total Cache, along with Cloudflare.

Hi Andrea, always reassuring to see you pop up. 

Ok, I'll have a look at those broken images. I do use WP Smush.it already, but in fact today it has been giving me errors and refusing to smush any new pics.

Thanks

Following this thread I have just activated W3 total cache which was not working until now, and successfully exported the media library to hostgator.com/wp-content/upload. When running Google pagespeed, it asks me to get rid of the redirects if possible. All those hostgator redirects lead to a 404 not found, and the images don't show on the blog anymore.

What did I miss? I can see the pictures are on the FTP.

sooverthis said:

There's a plugin called Regenerate Thumbnails that might help – it will resize every image on the site according to the sizes set in your Genesis settings. 

Make sure you're uploading the images as PNG and not JPG – JPGs are massive files and the quality isn't any better on a normal computer screen. Find out the biggest image size you're using – it'll be in functions.php where all the images are defined – and resize your image close to that ahead of time. For example, I always use images around 300x200 on my blog, so I size them that way before I upload. All the thumbnail/grid images in my child theme are smaller than that.

I'm a Mac user so I have no idea what image programs for PC would do this – I just use Preview on my Mac to size mine before I upload, and I open them in Illustrator or Photoshop to save as PNGs if they aren't already.

Hey Andrea,

Aren't PNG files larger than JPGs because they contain a lot more information and are lossless?  I have been doing graphics for some years and I have rarely seen a JPG bigger than a PNG file.  What this just a mix up or do you use a different program?

Why not just outsource the entire project to Andrea. Just look at what she does via her portfolio. It will definitely save you lots of time searching and waiting for answers, and things that you don't even know to take care of (or may overlook) will get taken care of the first time making it easier to hit the ground running once the redesign is done.  That's what I'm doing with my new project.

*Update… Found a great plugin called Imsanity, used it to bulk resize all the post images to 300x200, then re-smushed. Took a couple of minutes and voila! Google Pagespeed score now 89, with no high priority issues. Very pleased.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, even though I don't use them all it gives me ideas to work with and a kick up the butt to find out a solution!