Lighthouse Reduce Render Blocking Stylesheets and Scripts Warnings

Lighthouse Reduce Render Blocking Stylesheets and Scripts Warnings

Lighthouse Performance (which is a measure of speed) isn’t great on the Yoast home page, in particular issues with render blocking CSS and JS files.

1,500ms on render blocking stylesheets (CSS files).
1,410ms on render blocking scripts (js files).

This means there’s an almost 3,000ms delay while CSS and JS files load!

The problem here is like many WordPress powered sites the owner has added a bunch of theme and plugin features which add multiple CSS and JS files for various features (usually flashy features). I’m afraid if you want a flashy feature added by a theme/plugin it’s going to cost you speed, though there are SEO techniques to minimize the issue and in this case the Yoast team have NOT enabled those SEO techniques.

To put this speed delay into perspective, Amazon ran speed tests on it’s site which found for every 100ms they lost 1% in sales!!! Google, Microsoft and others have run similar speed tests, with similar results.

Speed really does matter and the Yoast site could be much faster with minor changes, for the Yoast site it’s the price paid for using Jquery features and having those in charge of technical SEO who do not know what they are doing.

Also looks like they haven’t bothered with lazy loading off-screen images which adds a further 580ms.

All these issues add to a site that’s slower than it should be.

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