I am not surprise, GP is one of the highest and fast-loading WP themes you can get today.
Each theme/site is different but, in my experience, the website´s performance is generally affected by the same issues...
- Hosting - If your site is hosted on a crappy server nothing you do after to optimized its loading speed will help. The first priority is to get your site´s hosted on a fast and robust server in order to offer a fast response time to your visitors.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Even if you´re targeting a local market almost ALWAYS will be a good idea to set up a CDN. This will greatly improve your site´s time to first byte (TTFB) and will also help unload some of the burdens to your hosting bandwidth
- Themes - I really hate the fact people like to spend money on multipurpose and overbloated themes just because they are feature-rich and, on top of everything, using a page builder to customize them. This is perhaps one of the worst combinations you can possibly expect.
- Plugins - Keeping the number of plugins to a minimum at the same time avoiding the usage of "site-wide" plugins are good options. Site-wide plugins are, for example, Contact Form 7 and RevSlider. They are called like this because once activated, they will inject CSS and JS to every single page on your site regardless of whether you´re using them on that page or not. So, keep the number of plugins small, be sure to use just the essentials, and don´t sacrifice appearance for performance.
- Performance Plugins - Personally, I love working with WP Rocket and Perfmatters. I found they work great together as they complement each other pretty damn well. Unfortunately, they are both paid/premium plugins but well worth their price.
- Page Builders - If anything, try to avoid the usage of page builders like Elementor, Divi, or Beaver. Instead, pick a theme with a Gutenberg block system or page builder capabilities. Nowadays are pretty solid options on themes like GeneratePress, Kadance, and Bricks.
- Images - 90%+ of all the sites I´ve worked on don´t have their images optimized for mobile devices. Nowadays, at least 2/3 of all the incoming organic traffic you will receive will come from mobile users. So, we have to make sure images are fully optimized to effectively fit mobile device viewports. Also, we need to think responsive now.
- External Scripts - This is often a very common issue. More and more webmasters are just abusing the usage of third-party apps, either analytics and tracking, pixels, messaging, marketing, ads, etc., without considering the impact the execution of these external scripts will have on their site´s performance.
Again, each theme is a different situation but in general, I believe this is a pretty good roadmap to follow if you´re looking to pinpoint what can be negatively affecting your site´s performance or page loading speed.
Cheers!
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