Lately you may have noticed changes in the way the page behaves. You noticed them correctly. If it seems to you that iGuRu.gr goes even further "sphere" is not your imagination.
Due to the coronavirus, we stayed home and started cleaning. Below we will see what can be collected on a site over time. Let's see what changes (which you can not see) were made on the page and note how much the numbers have decreased.
1. Reduce database size of iGuRu.gr from 1,7GB to 450MB (lots of junk, from previous add-on installs and themes. We threw 6 tables only from Yoast)
2. Remove (with great pleasure) of the Yoast add-on (from here) and use of The SEO Framework
3. The Time to first byte (TTFB: 0,250000) upgraded to Google standards (from 0.900000 to 0,250000)
For this, server-level interventions were performed (process cleaning and new settings in NGINX), and a new Caching system was added.
4. Reduce the volume of images from 15GB to 8GB, deleting all that was not used, and compressing the others.
5. Clear the site directories, as many plugins create their own. Many of them were left after the add-on was removed from the site.
6. Last but not least: Transfer site from dedicated server to Cloud VPS (not managed). (we are in the same company, and on a server based in Frankfurt).
In addition to the above we tried new themes (Astra and GeneratePress) but eventually decided that neither serves our needs like the Custom Genesis we use.
Nevertheless, we learned something:
Stay away from Astra for many reasons. Its code contains garbage, and the system that uses to resize the images, wp_options is full of garbage.
The Generate Press on the other hand it is a very well written theme, without bloats, ads etc. We could use it and maybe do it at some point if StudioPress stops being interested in Genesis.
Note: The results are probably noticeable to everyone and that was the goal. Tests on speedtest sites should be the tool and not the end in itself, since the goal should always be a better browsing experience for friends (and not) of iGuRu.gr.
The following screenshots show us the status of the website at the moment:
