DarnGoodRecipes A.
Finally got 97-99% MOBILE on Core Web Vitals!
I recently retired after over 3 decades in IT Management and Consulting. I've consulted and worked for Fortune 100, Federal Govt, Military, and small companies across the Southeast U.S. As I also was in the Foods industry, I started a Food Blog and hit a roadblock of poor site performance after over 100 recipes. It was nowhere near the big named sites speeds and the Core Web Vitals Metrics were around 40-60. So, I treated this like an IT Project and began my project requirements gathering. I knew to dig deeper than what was appearing to be popular solutions such as "The Top 10 Plugins for Performance". Also, during my research, I knew my hosting provider had to be changed out as part of the process. I also needed to change out my bloated Theme so, this was a major endeavor. And yes, I'm leading up to talking about Flying-Press. I ended up moving the site to a Cloud Service (Cloudways, using "Vultr"). My site increased a little bit and was more responsive but Core Web Vitals lingered around 50-60 and stopped going to the low 40s score. I then dropped my Theme ("DIVI") and changed to a much lighter one. I also researched a ton of plugins (over 100) and was testing multiple sets of caching, optimizing, cleaning, next-gen imaging, and after 2 weeks of working 16 hours a day I was staying in the 60-70 range. I just couldn't get it past that. Then, I tried the Flying-Press.com plugin. It had some similar settings like many others but there were some very unique setting options as well. The interface was easy to work through and it was well organized, a lot better than most. It had a good number of text boxes for pasting in some URLs of JS or CSS, and so on, for deferring, prioritizing, and so on. There was even an area I could paste in to allow caching of my grid layout queries tag. There were some very good explanatory help tips included, and other documentation on the site was helpful as well. I saw some amazing YouTube stories on it so, I stuck with it for about 3 more days before I accepted to myself that I could do this and get it better. Also, the plugin had some really good feedback and helpful notifications along the way. For example, it alerted me twice when it knew a plugin I was considering testing would have issues. I haven't done coding in JS nor CSS before so I was unsure if I could stick with it long enough to figure it out. Oh, and I've only been using WordPress for a little over a year so, there's that also. Anyway, I knew it was a keeper when I got my Vital Metrics recurring between the 70-85 scores for "Mobile". Well, after a couple more days, I dropped some of the most highly respected plugins like EWWW, WP-Optimizer, Breeze, and similar ones. I did a complete reconsideration of everything (but stayed with WordPress & Flying-Script). The absolute final and ultimate solution involved countless effort and reconsidering everything. You just can't hang on to some of those things. Time to get out of that comfort zone. If you stick with it, and get the right number of combined plugins, theme, and host, you can do it. During this entire multi-week project, I changed my host provider two times and my theme two times. I tested over 100 plugins before finding the best combination for an extremely high Core Performance score. After decades of experience involved with looking for and recognizing reliability, usability, consistency, and power, the FlyingPress plugin ultimately got me routinely now into the 95-99% scoring for Mobile and 97-100% for Desktop on the Core Web Vitals Metrics. Even Google finally gave me the passing green score for the Vitals. And now, for the first time, all my mobile ready pages went from yellow to green for performance via Googles analysis. Everything literally went through the roof in improvements. This will help my SEO and SERP tremendously. My site ranking has now been on the rise. My site is now equal to or faster than the leading competitor food blog sites. Soon, I'll be writing an article on DarnGoodRecipes.com of the items I used to get it to that score on my food blog. I'm still making design changes and have to retweak sometimes but the site is visible fast. I hear the developer helps those who ask for it if they need some guidance on their situation in using it. And, he offered my assistance as well but I got through it okay. In my situation, I was absolutely shocked to see the score when it eventually jumped from the 80s into 95-99 scoring for Mobile. I was kind-of okay to be in the 80s but I had felt I could learn and test different scenarios some more to try for the 90s. I'll now be doing some layout redesigns and adding ads so, I'll be reconfiguring FlyingPress again during those times. I'll also post what my settings were as well, and I'll include some links of 3 others who posted their settings they used to get their scores into the 90s.
Response from FlyingPressAug 19, 2022
Thank you so much, Jeff!


