Hello Ssnobben,

I think people need to start realizing that social networks are not just any CRUD application. It is a sophisticated and complicated system to begin with.

As for the recommendations that Lighthouse provides, it is very technical but I will try my best to make it less technical for you.

- Serve images in next-gen formats

Next generation image formats is webp and at this point of time, webp is not supported by Safari and Internet Explorer. There are work arounds but you also need to consider that your web server needs to have webp support compiled with php or a CLI. Not every hosting company will provide such tools and therefore we can't roll this out.

- Eliminate render-blocking resources

This has always been something that I always want to achieve but because we are just an extension level, we cannot do much. This has to happen on the CMS / template level.

- Properly size images

Same as the above. In order for us to be able to know what sizes are needed, we need to first know what is the template trying to do. Example: If your template renders a sidebar that is 300px in width, and if you only load an image that has 128px in width, the image would be pixelated.

- Efficiently encode images

This can be solved using the image optimizer service that we provide. Our demo site does not use this currently.

- Remove unused CSS

This is the same thing. This cannot be achieved by an extension, we have no idea what is needed on the template level. On the extension level, it becomes really tricky which pose the same problem as the render-blocking resources and efficiently encode image


With all said and done, we are continuously trying to improve all of this but I really do not think, this has much impact on most users unless most of your users are connecting with a slow internet connection

Thanks for this insights and analysis Mark.

I dont use Safari and IE is going out now bcs of Edge.

One Joomla free WebP extension you can try is https://dj-extensions.com/downloads/cat_view/354-dj-webp and I have tested it and working well on one site I tested it there.

No problem If your hoster supports webp, you could try using such a plugin.

But I think you got to cautiously use this plugin because this plugin would need to scan the entire html output for png/jpg imgages and that alone is going to consume CPU and will affect your FCP.