The last time I posted about my weird speed test I got a lot of positive responses (and some well-deserved flak, see the end of this post), so I thought I'd share something I've changed about my sites.My Old SetupI make the most money from display ads on my sites, and ads tend to slow a site down quite a bit, so I was always on the lookout for lean optimizations, minifications, etc. I looked into everything - micromanaging my htaccess, disabling code page-by-page, custom minimal Google Analytics code, the works. For a long time, I was running this set-up:WP Rocket for caching (my config json)Cloudflare for CDNAutoptimize for minificationShortpixel for image compression/webpPerfmatters for page-by-page script managementMinimalist analytics snippet from here.Yes I know, it seems like overkill, but it was fairly fast, and since there seemed to be no alternative I lived with it.However, many of the functions clashed, and it was an ugly bloaty Frankenstein of several different plugins. This is what it felt like.Trying Nitropack for the First TimeAt one point, I heard of Nitropack from a fellow r/juststarter, which promised to be a one-stop-shop for all things caching and speed, including their own CDN, image compression, minification, etc. I tried it and liked it for a while until I was at my folks' house and went to one of my websites on a new device. My product boxes were missing images. I tried some troubleshooting and realized that it was Nitropack. I tried their support and we couldn't find a solution, so I refunded my year package with them.I went back to my Frankenstein. This was last year.Nitropack AgainEarly this year, there was a discussion at the Facebook Group for AdThrive publishers, and a lot of people recommended Nitropack again there. I decided to give it a try again, and this time there was no problem with any images anywhere (I don't really know why). My scores were finally looking great, I was passing Core Web Vitals and loading under 2 seconds. I now use Nitropack on all of my ad-serving sites.Speed Testing with NitropackAnyway, I remembered my speed test and went back and recreated it all, but this time, I enrolled each site to Nitropack. These are the results:Google PageSpeed Scores, before and afterGTMetrix Scores, before and afterOverall, the change is impressive. Sites that were bumped up by 40-50 points, almost every one of them shows an almost perfect score and loads in 1-2 seconds.Like last time, there's a link to Google Drive with screenshots of all scores before and after Nitropack: Google Speedtest (mobile and desktop), GTMetrix (the two first pages), and screenshots of Nitropack's dashboard that shows improvements to the scores.Random findings:Average Largest Contentful Paint decreased by 7 seconds!Generally, TTFB decreased by an average of 400ms. In the case of GreenGeeks, it decreased by 1700ms!In the case of Kinsta, TTFB increased by 20ms, I guess it's expected since they have their own optimization and caching in place.Bluehost has the worst GTMetrix score even after Nitropack. Whereas most hosts moved from B or C to A, Bluehost was still B even with heavy Nitropack optimization.Like last time, at the end of the post on my blog, there's a link to download all the reports for yourself.Let me know what you think.PS. Critique From Last TimeLast time I posted I also got some flak for not including a managed VPS provider as an advanced alternative to run-of-the-mill shared hosting. So I went back and tested Cloudways on a small Digital Ocean droplet. The whole experience felt very streamlined and in no way inferior or more difficult to shared hosting, and the scores were good, except, for some reason, for an abysmal 8 seconds of Largest Contentful Paint! I have no explanation for this except maybe the site is bottlenecked by the size of the droplet? Which doesn't sound right. Anyway, I updated the original post with the scores for Cloudways.On another note, I decided I didn't want to be a devil's advocate and removed GoDaddy from the winner's list while keeping the scores. I don't want to be called an endorser of EIG hosting. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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