Hi Rebecca,

Thank you for writing, I hope you’re doing well.

The plugins you’re using should be OK to lower the size of your images and for page optimization. However, there are a couple more things you can do to improve the performance of your website.

For Smart, we recommend having all your options for Images, CSS and JavaScript turned on in Theme Settings > Performance. Unfortunately, I’m not able to log into your site with the credentials you provided to check if these are active. Could you check your access details and send them again in a private reply?

For page cache, WP Fastest Cache should be fine. However, we recommend W3 Total Cache (https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/), since it’s been largely tested with our themes.

Whatever it is the plugin you’re using for page cache, we recommend turning off all its file minification options for HTML, CSS and JS, and use Autoptimize instead: https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/. Here is a screenshot with our recommended configuration for Autoptimize: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l621ucr6mlpuepk/Screen%20Shot%202017-06-28%20at%2014.53.49-fullpage.png?dl=0&raw=1.

Also, you may want to take a look at this article about website performance and optimization: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/. It has a lot of useful information that can be relevant to your site.

One last thing: We would really appreciate if you could give us some information about your server setup, such as the name of your hosting provider and your current plan, so we can check if there’s some kind of limitation there that may be slowing down your site.

Hope this helps. Please let us know how it goes.

Best,

Andrés.

Hi Rebecca,

I just checked your settings and they seem to be fine. In fact, according to GTmetrix, your website is doing pretty fine in terms of performance: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/neu.nusweet.de/ypSBGhXW

About the recommendation you’re gettig from Pingdom, I just went ahead to your W3TC settings and checked all the “Remove query strings from static resources” options inside Performance > Browser Cache. Usually, that’s enough for the query strings to be fully removed, but some plugins could override this behavior, so you may want to take a look at this article: https://technumero.com/remove-query-strings-from-static-resources/. In case you need to add some PHP code, you can do that inside the functions.php file of your Child Theme.

Besides this, since your site is still loading a little slower than what is usual for this theme, I would recommend two more things:

1) Update both Smart and the NiceFramework to their latest available versions. We added a lot of performance improvements since the versions you have, so updating will definitely help. You can do that by going to Smart > Support & Updates. Just remember to make a full backup of the theme before the update. In case you run into some issue while updating, you can always download the latest available version of the theme right here, or from ThemeForest.

2) Optimize and reduce the size of your images as much as you can, especially the ones you’re using for the homepage slider. Smart loads images on-demand when using the LazyLoad feature, but Slider Revolution uses its own loading method, which is not as effective as LazyLoad.

Please let us know if this helps.

Best,

Andrés.

Hi Rebecca,

Thanks for the follow-up.

Unfortunately, the version of the theme that you are currently using had a bug related to the one-click update when using child themes. Would you please send me your FTP access details in a private reply so I can manually update your parent theme? You are right, if you overwrite the wp-content/themes/smart folder with the contents you got on the zip, you will be updating the theme.

Best,
Juan.