Recommendations

You are certainly already aware of the importance of performance optimizations and have checked this kind of useful articles on how to optimize your website for better loading speed:

https://www.keycdn.com/blog/google-pagespeed-insights-wordpress

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/

To keep this short, here is the list of criteria which should be met:

Usage of images & media, optimized for web (in your todo)

Always optimize your images for web to reduce their size. You can do it manually by “saving for web” in your image editor, you can use third-party online optimizations like TinyJpeg or Jpegmini, you can use CDNs with image optimizations like “Polish” by cloudflare to serve the images in modern formats (WebP) or you can use services like “Imagify” by WP Rocket team.

Lazy loading of media assets (already done, can be enabled in theme options)

Lazy loading of media assets is extremely important for the performance of a webpages as it allows to avoid loading of all media assets immediately on page load, but to load assets only by nearing the viewport. Please refer to this article for more details

Minimization of client-server requests (already done)

While using TheGem you should not care about this point, because all scripts and styles in TheGem are already optimized to be kept at the lowest needed level. However, while building your own new webpages, keep in mind, that the higher number of used media content (for example images) results in higher number of server requests.

Proper positioning of page’s styles and scripts (already done)  

Again, you should not care much about this point, because all scripts & styles in TheGem are already positioned properly to get the highest loading pagespeed scores.

Webpage caching and css & js minification (already done, can be enabled in theme options)

It is strongly recommended to minify the code of your web-pages to achieve better pagespeed results. For faster delivering of static content Google recommends to use webpage caching. In this way all your pages are getting cached and saved on your server, so by requesting this pages the delivery occurs in much faster way.

TheGem includes one-click optimization feature, allowing you to setup webpage caching and minification with just a single click. Please refer to this article for more details

Server response times (in your todo)

This is how quick your server reacts to client’s requests. The best way to achieve fast response times is to choose proper hosting provider like for example:

https://wpengine.com/

https://www.siteground.com/

https://godaddy.com 

https://kinsta.com/

In case the response time is low, you need to contact your server’s provider to resolve this issue or, alternatively, use another server & hosting provider

CDN (optional, recommended)

CDNs are an excellent way to speed up your webpage loading by delivering it to the user from the nearest available server, in this way reducing the number of nodes needed to deliver your content. If your website audience come from all around the world or from different countries, we recommend to use CDN services. Another useful feature here is an option to use smart image compression (available via CloudFlare, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-polish-automatic-image-optimizati/). If you choose to use such tools like “Polish” in CloudFlare, you don’t even need to care about image optimization by yourself – all this will be automatically done by this service and you will get excellent results.

Use as less third-party wp plugins as possible (optional, recommended)

The last thing we would strongly recommend is to keep your WordPress installation as deflated as possible. Try to avoid any third-party plugins, which are not really needed for your project / websites. Firstly, it could be a great security leak (as the experience of the previous decade shows) and secondly, it brings additional code, scripts and styles which can slow down your website.

Try to avoid heavy sliders in hero sections (optional, recommended)

Try to avoid using heavy Revolution Slider or LayerSlider in the hero section of your page. It might sound very controversial as Revolution & LayerSliders are made for making spectacular hero sections, however unfortunately Google Pagespeed doesn’t really like it, especially by testing the mobile pagespeed.