Video fallback image causing enormous performance issues on mobile devices.

My main concern in getting performance dialed in is that my rankings have tanked for some unidentified reason, and my SEO company cannot seem to identify an issue that would explain the seriousness of the drop (no penalties or manual actions etc). . . I am wondering if my performance issue may be related to another problem on the back end that could be causing google to not like my site. Pagespeed insights says there are problems, even though the actual experience is pretty quick. Another reason I am baffled by this.

If you use the Web Developer Tools in Firefox, you’ll see that there are 4 errors at the bottom. I have no clue what they mean, but I am now wondering if those are related to anything and if they are related to whatever my ranking issue is (I know speed is not the main factor, but I am wondering if it is a symptom of a larger, deeper issue that google won’t just tell me directly).

I haven’t the foggiest idea if this CORS thing is related to the theme, but when I copy/pasted those error/warnings to dreamhost support, this was their response. . . before I do anything I want to check with y’all so I don’t break something:
“Hello,
Thank you for contacting DreamHost support, my name is Ryan. Neo has
left for the day, but I would be happy to assist.

Thank you for providing the errors. So the information you provided would
be related to Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). From the two links, I
do see the links are from external sources.

-https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v55bfa2fee65d44688e90c00735ed189a1713218998793.

-https://analytics.google.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-C340SLHPCH&gtm=45je44o0v9130446013za200&_p=1714105001507&gcd=13l3l3l3l1&npa=0&dma=0&cid=251425839.1713672402&ul=en-us&sr=1792×1120&ir=1&pscdl=noapi&_eu=EA&_s=1&sid=1714104991&sct=16&seg=1&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fgatehealing.com%2F&dr=https%3A%2F%2Fgatehealing.com%2Fwp-admin%2Fadmin.php%3Fpage%3Dwpfastestcacheoptions&dt=Counseling%20In%20Austin%20For%20Individuals%20%26%20Couples%20%7C%20Gate%20Healing%20PLLC&en=page_view&_ee=1&ep.anonymize_ip=true&tfd=8329%E2%80%9D

So those external links did have issues, which are limited due to the
CORS setup. You can enable Cross Origin Resource Sharing on your site
which should help with the issues. For more information, please see the
following:

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037198972-CORS-headers

CORS headers are added to an .htaccess file in your site’s main
directory. View the following article for further details.

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215747598-Setting-headers-with-an-htaccess-file

By setting the desired CORS setting in the .htaccess you can allow those
locations, you can either set the domain itself, or you can set specific
urls. You can try adding those values to see if it does help with the
issues. Some users do need to enable it for their setup, for example if
your images are being uploaded and cached by Jetpack directly as they are
cached and loaded from the Jetpack url and not your domain directly.

If you have any other questions or issues please let me know. We are
always happy to help.”

Related to that last post of mine (above): I have deactivated the WPFC and am trying my Dream Host page caching service, which has gotten me into the mid 70’s for mobile devices.

Do I need to leave the compression settings as minified without merging, or should I switch it to merge and compress css/js?

J

Thanks Mike! I appreciate the advice. When I look at my historical data on my domain and url authority (and serp rankings), the drop predates the updates (I could be remembering that wrong, but the drop happened several years ago…I had gotten everything dialed in and stopped checking…not smart). My SEO folks said some thing about regular updates to blog, but that even with that and a poor backlink profile, I should not have dropped as far as I did (if you google Counseling 78746 (my zip code) I’m not listed at all. I used to be in the top 3 in SERPs and map; however, people with horrid websites with terrible Ux, no backlinks, no blog, confusing layout, inconsistent header tags, and spelling/grammar errors ARE ranked…AND several of them aren’t in my zip code…they’re all the way across town). I get dropping off of page one, even beyond page 3, but to not be ranked at all in my zip code or city isn’t explained by backlinks nor blog or the folks with no backlinks nor blog at all wouldn’t be up on pages 3 and 4.

So that’s the long version backstory of why I’m digging in to everything. I’m wondering if the speed issue on mobile is a symptom of some other technical issue that is the bots don’t like. If there’s garbled code that works, but bloats things, plus any other overly complex stuff, I’m wondering if that plus backlinks and recent blog posts could better explain this … I think I’m going to find some ridiculous technical thing that cascades in to a larger SEO issue, but doesn’t break my site (like a line of code, a freaking semi colon or space somewhere).

Apologies for not updating y’all before I stopped for the night. It took some experimenting, but I got my mobile scores to 70-85, which is ok for now (used to be 95+). I am using my hosts page cache, which somehow integrates with WP super cache, which integrates with Jet Boost. In boost, if I enable the Critical CSS, mobile speed goes to 30’s, but if I disable that and enable the 3 js/css canonicalization etc features, it gets them back to 70-85.

I have no idea what changed. I was in mid tp upper 90’s for quite some time, then all of a sudden, mobile speed tanked.

Re: CORS: I realized that was because I was using private browser. I may have put the wildcard CORS headers in htaccess just in case…I’ll have to check.

I’ll keep working. I’ve been cleaning up old posts grammar etc. but slowed down. Need to get back to that and post new stuff more.

Thx!
J

Per Dream Host, I have installed Fast Velocity Minify, which got the homepage back to the 80’s, but /counseling-austin-tx/ is still in the 50’s-60’s; other inner pages are a little better, but not as good as the homepage.

(First, can I add to this thread by replying to the emails? I’m not getting a bounce back, but I’m not sure if I can do that or not)

When I try to pick smaller sizes, the images are blurry. I figured it was because it was stretching the image to fit a window . . . I thought that the theme element would pick the correct thumbnail size to match the size that I was defining in the dropdowns, but I think that must be me picking the actual image . . . I don’t know how to know how big the image area is for each area, so it’s tough to know what size thumbnail to assign to it.

Am I missing something that shows me the size of the window that is designed for the image window?

see private

@Mike, so here’s what’s odd. This is the PSI I just ran. . . it’s back to 73: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-gatehealing-com/g76fe8ffqh?form_factor=mobile

I’m not sure what size each element that I use an image for is expecting? How do I know what size to pick if there is no direction as to what it is looking for? Do I just put one in that is too big, but that looks good (if I pick too small, it looks fuzzy . .. too large and it cuts off words) then run PSI to see if it is expecting a different size, then go back to the library and choose the closest match?

Is there a setting in Enfold that I can turn on that tells me in the element box what size image the element itself is looking for?

@Mike
Where did you see that syntax error? Was it in the WP dashboard, like a banner?

@Mike,

You know, I am wondering if your tests went so much faster since they went through a different server. I am communicating with my host to see if their server settings are problematic.

Let me know if your tests were running through your server vs my website’s.

J

UPDATE:
I am updating all tech folks trying to help me figure this mess out. I paused cloudflare, waited a bit then re-tested using psi. Mobile performance is 66. About the same as I get with cloudflare. I was able to repeat in other browsers with the same result (62-66 performance scores).

Tells me it’s not cloudflare, I think…

Hey @Mike

My host is wondering if you ran your tests on a dedicated WordPress server?

J

@Mike
I am hosted at Dream Host on a shared server. They had said that such a small site with not shopping cart and low traffic (it’s just a local business) that a shared server should be fine. . .and for several years it was. I don’t know what happened.