You could use Teleport or some other crawler to create a “proper” offline version of the website. However, if your client would want to showcase posting something or some other functionality that requires database interaction, then you’re far better off using a local installation on XAMPP or alternatives of it (enable Apache and MySQL to … Read more
Simplest way to see what is causing it is to disable all plugins and add them back one at a time. If that doesn’t reveal it, switch to a default theme. After that I’d say it is something server side. To answer your question though – caching should help but it depends on what is … Read more
Your expires value in your CDN settings is likely set to a low number. Your CDN expires header is overriding what is coming from your origin server which is why when you enabled the CDN, you received that message from Pingdom. Try increasing your CDN’s expires value. Also if you’re searching for a reliable CDN … Read more
In nearly all of the case WP doesn’t participate in serving static files. Its rewrite rules are typically configured to ignore them and let web server handle. Otherwise overhead of firing up PHP engine and WP core for each static request would be incredibly taxing. As such there is no mechanism in WP to deal … Read more
In general no, there is no advantage in having two caching entities in the way of each request. But you should be careful and understand how the caching works. For example cloudflare do not cache your pages in a central repository but each data center has its on cache so in an edge case you … Read more
If the files are being cached, then whatever caching solution you are using is working! That’s why there’s a clear caching button available. Typically JS and CSS files will be cached. While you are in development I recommend changing the version of the file being cached. This can be done by updating the wp_enqueue_script (js … Read more
Follow on to comment is too long so done as answer: As I understand it your test site works as HTTPS unless WPSC is activated? Another (quick to test) hunch: Under WPSC “Advanced” settings: check on “Simple” then check the “Late Init” (and/or “HTTP Headers”) boxes – save settings. N.B. if you deactivate WPSC these … Read more
You need to have a lot of traffic for naive protocol based optimizations to be effective, and even then it is not obvious that you can gain much even when it does kick in. Most people will be first time users of your site, and browser have only a limited space to store information about … Read more
The option_value column in the database is LONGTEXT, meaning it can hold up to 4GB of text. But keep in mind that WordPress loads all options on every page load by default, and storing large values for options you only intend to use on a single page is inefficient. Either set the autoload argument of … Read more
In the end, I used speed booster plugin to defer javascript and inline CSS. For minifying, I manually minify the .js script and .css files before hand. This helped to improve my pagespeed score without going through first load issue. Like Tom J Nowell suggested, do not use brute force hammer approach by using plugins … Read more