That’s surprising, as Photon should actually speed things up on your site, not slow things down.
GTMetrix may however bring your site’s score down when Photon is active, because of the way the Photon URLs are formed.
Photon caches your images before they’re queried by GTMetrix when you run their tool. Then, Photon serves images requested by your site and uses query strings to request a specific version of each image, based on the size needed. Those query strings aren’t the typical query strings GTMetrix expects when scanning sites, though. They are not there for caching, or to resize the images on the fly in your browser; they in fact refer to different cached images on Photon servers.
GTMetrix may recommend that you remove the query strings from those URLs, but that recommendation doesn’t really apply to Photon URLs.
That said, none of this should actually change the loading speed of your site.
Would you mind activating Photon again for a little bit, and then post your site URL here so I can have a closer look?
If you want it to remain private, you can also contact us via this contact form:
http://jetpack.com/contact-support/
Thanks!
Hello Jeremy,
Thank you for your response! My understanding was that Photon would speed up my site, which is why I’ve had it activated for so long. I never suspected it might be causing speed issues. Here’s the thing though – I have used it intermittently with plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Smush, and most recently, EWWW Image Optimizer. With Photon activated but none of those other 3 plugins, my site speed is at around 10 seconds to upload. With any of those other plugins ALSO enabled, my site speed drops to between 22 and 36 seconds. It’s insanely slow. When I deactivated all 4 of those plugins, including Photon, my site speed finally improved to just over 6 seconds.
Photon still remains active on my site. I only had it deactivated for about a day because as soon as I turned it off, the featured images in all my blogs “broke.” They stopped being responsive and instead reverted to smaller images with gray hatch marks to the right of the image. I have no idea why or how to fix it without using Photon, so I reactivated it. My URL is http://www.twosmallpotatoes.com.
Also, your paragraph about the GTMetrix errors/suggestions is SPOT on. I’ve been wracking my brain and troubleshooting for weeks to figure out why my caching plugin wasn’t fixing all the image, query string, and caching errors that kept showing. It’s at least a relief to find someone who knows what’s generating the errors, even if it shouldn’t be bogging down my site!
I’m open for any and all suggestions as long as it isn’t complicated coding!
Thanks for sending me a link to your site, and for the extra details.
I wonder if Photon may be caching large versions of your images, while you’ve actually optimized those images a lot thanks to WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer.
Unfortunately, I can’t flush Photon’s cache for all those images at once, so the old version of all the images on your site will remain cached for at least a year.
That leaves us with 2 alternatives:
- Continue to use Photon, WP Smush, and EWWW Image Optimizer. Make sure that WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer optimize your images immediately on upload, and not later. This way, each one of the images you upload from now on will be optimized by the 2 plugins, then optimized again by Photon. You’ll be serving smaller images, and as soon as you’ll only have new posts appearing on your site’s home page, your GTMetrix score should go up.
- Deactivate the Photon module. If you run into issues when deactivating it, make sure you flush your site’s cache, as well as your browser cache, to see the most recent version of each image there. If you still get broken images, I’d recommend checking your Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer settings to make sure it’s not breaking the resized versions of the images you upload to your site.
Let me know how it goes.
Hi Jeremy,
I think that’s exactly what Photon is doing, though I have no idea why. Either way, I can’t use it if it’s doing that since I have 2500+ images on my site and it’s crucial for them to be optimized.
So as you said, that leaves two options. I would prefer to not use Photon if it is caching large versions of my images. I consistently had issues with it also when I was using either of the other 2 image optimizers: W3 Total Cache and EWWW Image Optimizer. While trouble shooting with my web provider, SiteGround, they recommended I not use W3TC, but I would like to continue using EWWW. I individually tested several images with it before doing any batch resizing and didn’t note any loss of resolution or strange resizing issues with it.
So for your latter suggestion, I did as you said and turned off Photon, and my featured images are again downsized/no longer responsive. You can see here how the photos display incorrectly.
http://www.twosmallpotatoes.com/page/18/
I’m starting to think the answer is in the timeline. All photos uploaded after I rolled over to a self hosted site are intact. However, the majority of the featured images used in blogs BEFORE I made the switch are affected when I turn off Photon. I completely forgot but I actually encountered this problem about a year ago when I was tweaking Jetpack settings and turned off Photon. This was months before I ever installed W3TC or EWWW. When Jetpack is installed, do you know if Photon is on by default? Because if so, my self-hosted site has always been relying on Photo to display the correctly sized featured images. How would that even be possible when the images showed correctly when I had a wordpress.com site and when my theme, even self hosted, is responsive?! Does any of this even make sense?
I’m desperate for a resolution to this so I can turn off Photon and resume using EWWW. Ideas??
I did as you said and turned off Photon, and my featured images are again downsized/no longer responsive. You can see here how the photos display incorrectly.
http://www.twosmallpotatoes.com/page/18/
I can see the issue, but I’m afraid it isn’t linked to Photon. What happens if you remove the Featured Image from that post, and then add it back?
When Jetpack is installed, do you know if Photon is on by default?
The module is off by default.
How would that even be possible when the images showed correctly when I had a wordpress.com site
WordPress.com also uses Photon, so you wouldn’t have noticed the issue there.
I’m desperate for a resolution to this so I can turn off Photon and resume using EWWW. Ideas??
If the problem only happens for your old posts, I think it’s safe to use EWWW right now.
