That indeed doesn’t sound like an intended behavior, could you open a support ticket for your domains in question so we could investigate this further?

Cheers,
Predrag

@dubajicp1

This is in general whether I have a simple or complex Divi design.

I check all my website’s performance at least once a day using Gtmetrix. As I’ve said, the speed can be fast then the next time I check it’ll load an extra second or two. It’s very inconsistent. When I look at the waterfall tab in gtmetrix, the cause of the slower speed is usually the CDN. That goes for HB and Smush.

I’m not super technical. I can only assume that the issue is stackpath.

As much as I want to take advantage of the CDN since it’s part of the subscription, I’d rather not if it’s going to be inconsistent. This would be a problem if I had more traffic.

This has been going on for a long time.

It would be great if we’re allowed to use third-party CDN services OR maybe allow us to switch from stackpath to another option included in our subscription.

You guys can include stackpath and bunny for example.

Hey Simplebutcreative Media, sorry to hear you haven’t seen much improvement when using Smush and Hummingbird on your end.

Is this something that is specific to this complex Divi site or you had similar experience with other sites?
If you could open a ticket about this we would like to have a look at it and see what could be causing it and how we could improve these two.
We would love to hear your thoughts about HB 3.0 in there as well.

I’ll make sure to pass over the suggestion for other CDN providers to our Hummingbird team.

Cheers,
Predrag

I’ve been running my sites without HB and Smush for about 2 months now. I can tell you that my sites are loading just as fast when HB and Smush were installed, sometimes a little faster. The main takeaway is that it loaded way more CONSISTENTLY without HB and Smush.

I’m running Divi and somewhat complex design.

I have yet to try HB 3.0.

Next update or future ones should allow us to use other CDN services. From what I’ve seen, stackpath is very inconsistent. I’m not sure if that’s a plugin problem or their service. Some tests will be fast and the next batch it’ll load slower.

I haven’t done an official by-the-book test, but I have noticed a definite difference in page speeds & performance, on all of my test sites.

Here are my current testing zone specs:
– 2 sites have Cloudflare, with APO enabled
– 1 site has Cloudflare, without APO
– 1 site doesn’t have Cloudflare at all

So there are a lot of variables here, but the best performers, hands-down, are my sites with CF & APO enabled. (I also use our hosting for all of my test sites, and know that makes an impact as well.)

Thanks for reading & commenting!

~ Janette

Thanks, that is helpful. So it may be less interesting for me since I don’t serve an international audience. Going from 3.9s to 0.8s for far away visitors is impressive though. Definitely worth the $5.

Oh boy it seems age may be catching up to me. The post above is obviously meant to be a reply to you. ;-)

I have done so on a kinsta site and it really depends where your visitor is connecting from but what it removes is any latency. So no matter where in the world the visitor is browsing your site from they experience local server loading time.

In the test that was done on local destinations it shaved off around 0.2s but where it really flew was from destinations far away from my origin server that previously had 3.9s loading time, it brought down to 0.8s

Hope this helps give you a clearer picture as to the difference.