Speed advisor: what to turn on for a faster site

The Speed advisor reads your home page (and the last Lighthouse report you imported) and lists what to turn on in Baza Helper and what only the theme can fix. It is a card at the top of the performance diagnostics in Baza Helper > Cache & Optimization.

Run it

1. Open Baza Helper > Cache & Optimization and find the Speed advisor card.
2. Press Analyze this site. The plugin requests your home page from the same site, and also uses the last Lighthouse report if you imported one.
3. Read the advice. Each item has a short reason. Advice that is already on is not offered again.
4. Tick what you want and press Turn on the selected. The switches are turned on together, the page cache is cleared and a warmup starts.
5. Open the site and test it, especially forms, menus and sliders.

Advice the plugin can apply has a switch, and the button applies the chosen ones at once. Advice the plugin cannot apply is plain text with the tag Do it yourself and no switch.

If everything recommended is already on, the card says Nothing to turn on: the recommended switches are already on. If the home page does not answer with HTTP 200, the advisor tells you so and gives no advice.

What it can recommend

• Page cache with static delivery: the page is built again for every visitor, which is the time to first byte. A saved copy answers at once.
• A longer cache lifetime (6 hours): a copy that lives five minutes is often gone when a visitor or a speed test arrives. The cache is cleared when content changes anyway.
• Combine local stylesheets into one file when more than six stylesheets block the page: one file is one request instead of many.
• Fonts: show text at once (font-display swap) and load the main fonts early (automatic preload).
• Defer the scripts of Elementor and its add-ons.
• Defer all scripts, jQuery and the theme included: the plugin defers them in a safe order and keeps jQuery first when the page runs inline code that needs it.
• Protect and preload the largest picture: the largest picture of the first screen is found and loaded first, and never lazy-loaded.
• Lazy-load the pictures below the first screen when the page has more than eight pictures.
• Leave out styles the home page does not use: when the Lighthouse report shows a stylesheet that is more than 90 percent unused on the home page, the advisor offers to leave it out of the home page only (it adds the handle with @front to the rules in Scripts and styles). Merged copies, protected handles and jQuery are never offered. Check the page afterwards.
• Keep the theme’s own scripts out of the deferral: shown when Defer all scripts is on and the first screen is drawn more than one second after the page arrives.
• Load the merged stylesheets after the first screen: this needs Critical CSS.
• Do it yourself: make phone-sized copies of large pictures (Images tab, Generate with Regenerate all), generate Critical CSS with Generate automatically in the Critical CSS panel, and generate it again when it is larger than 30 KB (it is made for one screen size, a phone). Then check the page.

For the theme developer

Some problems cannot be fixed by a plugin switch. A second list, For the theme developer, collects them from the page and the report: scripts in the head without defer and the plugin or theme that prints them, forced reflow, text colours with too little contrast, ARIA attributes that are not allowed on the element, pictures bigger than they are shown, styles the page does not use and too much work on the main thread. Press Copy the list to send it to whoever builds your theme.

If jQuery must stay first because the page prints inline code that calls it by itself, the advisor says so and names the scripts. Wrap that code in a DOMContentLoaded handler or print it with wp_add_inline_script.

Good to know

• The advisor changes only the plugin’s own switches in Cache & Optimization. It never edits your theme or other plugins.
• It reads the home page only. Run it again after you change the theme or add a plugin.
• Import a fresh Lighthouse report in the diagnostics card to get the facts about unused CSS, contrast and large pictures.