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Hi
I’ve just been notified by Webmaster Tools that my new Enfold-themed site has produced some ‘critical’ mobile usability errors. I can see from this forum that others have recently been having similar experiences.
I appreciate what you’ve said in other responses about the fact that the Google automated analysis isn’t particularly refined, but whilst that may be the case, the fact is they’re threatening mobile ranking penalties, so – given that search is important for the site – Google are making it our problem!
One of the ‘must fix’ notifications is ‘enable compression’. The detailed report indicates that this refers to a good deal of background files from Enfold (e.g. Compressing http://www.bathtutors.com/…t/themes/enfold/css/shortcodes.css?ver=2 could save 128.2KiB (82% reduction).There are a lot of similar items identified from the theme).
Is this something that can be fixed? If so, how would I go about it?
ThanksJust an addendum to my question above. The PageSpeed Insights report is also flagging ‘Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content’ and also ‘Optimize CSS Delivery ‘. Again, when viewed in detail, these all seem to refer to a large number of files that comprise the Enfold theme.
Hey!
A good place to start could be adding a minify- and caching plugin to see if that helps.
BWP Minify: http://wordpress.org/plugins/bwp-minify/
W3 Total Cache: https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Google complains about ‘above the fold’ files on every site I have ever tested, they are needed and they need to be loaded above the fold, in the header to be more precise.
Regards,
RikardThanks for the response Rikard.
Scanning the documentation for those two plug-ins I must say it all looks a bit intimidatingly complex. The level of technical comprehension that appears to be required is way outside of my comfort zone. Will these plug-ins need a lot of configuration to get them working with Enfold?
Their documentation also seems to suggest that it’s necessary to start using a Content Delivery Network – is that the case?
All of this is really falling into the category of ‘problems I could do without’!Hey westernaspect!
They should not require any special knowledge from your end, just using the recommended settings should work just fine. Using a CDN might benefit your site too, I’ll let you research that to see if it’s something you would like to use.
These are definitely problems no one likes, but since we are all in the hands of Google, we need to make them happy to get the ranking our sites deserve. I just want to point out that the analysis provided by Google is by no means perfect.
Best regards,
Rikard
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