Remedy Site Speed Concerns
There were several site speed issues we uncovered, including images in redirect loops, images significantly larger than their containers, unused CSS / JS/font files, and too many embedded HTML objects, all resulting in excessive requests and bytes downloaded that slowed the site down considerably.

To remedy this, images were resized correctly, and redirect loops, as well as excess files, were removed.

We then noticed a discrepancy with the pages being indexed by Google. This meant the site had additional low-value fragment pages that search engine crawlers were wasting crawl budget on. While reviewing the indexed pages, we saw potentially competing pages that could be considered duplicate content as the staging site was being indexed with the same content.

The fix here was to remove all the tag and category pages from the site, reducing crawled pages by 1,275, and adding NOINDEX to the staging site being indexed on Google.

THE RESULTS
We checked off many of the items negatively affecting the website. Desktop and mobile site speed scores both increased, search engine crawlers spent more time crawling pages that added value to the site, and indexed pages more closely matched the number of live pages on the website.

As Desktop site speed scored quite well throughout our site performance tests, mobile had the most potential for improving site speed scores.