The Huge Divi Performance Update Explained

In this video I will introduce you to the Divi performance update and explain in simple terms all of the important features.

Written Blog Post: https://www.peeayecreative.com/the-huge-divi-performance-update-explained/

The Greatest Divi Update Ever!

For years, people complained about Divi performance. Honestly, most of the issues were actually related to stupid cheap hosting! That’s right, I said it. Get yourself some good hosting! Although perhaps some felt as if Elegant Themes was deaf to these complaints, I assure they were not! The have been working on many foundational and performance updates since early 2020. Today is the first of these big changes coming to Divi, and to date one of the best days ever for Divi users! Elegant Themes has released a huge update to version 4.10 with tons of performance improvements! In this tutorial I will try my best to give you a clear, simple to understand explanation of each of the new settings. I will explain in simple terms all of the important features of this new important Divi performance update.

Before You Update
This should go without saying, but I need to remind you!

Always create a backup before updating a plugin or theme

Always test the update first on a staging site

Always clear all your cache after updating

I also recommend waiting until a few x.x.x updates after the main x.x update. This allows the team to fix commonly reported bugs. This usually means waiting a week ore two to update your lives sites.

Always do the normal troubleshooting steps before contacting support

Do You Still Need Optimization Plugins?
A lot of people are already asking questions such as, “Are plugins such as SG Optimizer or WP Rocket are still needed?” You need to keep in mind that Divi is only part of your website. You also definitely need caching and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) enabled. Those things are outside of Divi and not relevant to it, and should always be used in combination with the performances optimization features that Divi has built-in. As a general rule of thumb, yo should never have two plugins or settings doing the exact same thing, and this is actually less of a factor now that they removed the minify and combine JS and CSS options. Elegant Themes tested the new features with all of the most popular performance plugins to help identify conflicts before releasing it, so in general you should be fine continuing to use your favorite caching and optimization plugin and especially a CDN.

Testing, Testing, 123
What good is a lot of technical talk and hype without real-world results, right? I was going to give you some of my own test results, but I decided it was going to get way overwhelming. There are so many scenarios and factors that it would just get crazy complicated. Instead, I want you to go test. Run some tests in Google Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix before and after you update. Or install the update on your staging site and compare various pages on the site.

My Personal Test Results
Hemant and I have tested many many sites in the last week. Every single page we test is certainly better. How much better depends on a lot of factors! Please keep in mind that Divi is a theme, and is totally reliant on good solid hosting, a good quality CDN, and proper caching. Simple standard Divi websites are pretty much perfect, it is so exciting and awesome. When you move into Theme Builder templates and WooCommerce and other things like that, there is still some room for improvement. But in general, we tested a lot of scenarios including huge ecommerce stores and blogs, and all of them were much better with the new Divi update.

Test Sites Created By Elegant Themes
You probably noticed that Divi now has a public test page for you to run your own tests. They also have test sites for other popular themes, and below is a list of the ones that I have found (there may be more that I missed or more added in the future).

Divi
https://divi.website/divi/

Elementor
https://divi.website/elementor/

Gutenberg & Astra
https://divi.website/gutenberg/

Beaver Builder & Gutenberg
https://divi.website/beaver-builder/

Avada
https://divi.website/avada/

Oxygen
https://divi.website/oxygen/

New Performance Settings In Theme Options
The biggest changes in the new 4.10 update is in the Divi Theme Options. Previously there was the General tab, but now they have added the new Performance tab. Let’s take a close look at what changed in each of these tabs.

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