This is just a quick blogpost about the Revo Optimizer plugin. It is a performance plugin created especially for Yootheme Pro templates. In itself, Yootheme templates are already very fast and lightweight, but the last year or so, Google is aiming more and more for speed, with a detail on Page Experience and Core Web Vitals, and that is what this plugin is for.
You can read more about Core Web Vitals here: www.webvitalsdev.com/core-web-vitals-for-beginners
Yootheme is currently using UIkit version 3 for its templates, and this still has some issues due to blocking resources, web font shift while loading, images without explicit width and height and some more smaller issues. Uikit version 4 should hopefully solve many of these issues, but untill then, a solution is needed. Especially since Google anounced that as of february 2022, Page Experience will be a ranking factor for desktop search, this is an important issue to focus on: www.seroundtable.com/google-page-experience-update-desktop-in-february-2022-32370.html
Now recently, Alex Revo (also one of the developers of the Yootheme team), developed a plugin to improve Yootheme performance. I recently tested it on a few of my sites, and I was pretty impressed. It solved quite a few of the issues I had.
Installation
Installation is easy, and a lot of work is done automatically. On top of that, you have a few options to customize processing:
For Joomla 3 and 4 there are some additional settings.
I noticed in some sites, I had to recompile the Less files in Yootheme (Style section, at the bottom) to make it work fully.
Results in Lighthouse
After installation, Ligthouse scores improved quite a bit for both mobile and desktop, see this screenshot of the desktop test (mobile result is a 97 score):
Note that it was not simply a matter of installing the plugin to get these results, but it sure helped for the last few percentages!
Download
If you're interested to try it out, you can order it through https://alexrevo.pw/product/revo-theme-optimizer.html for €25,-.
