Realizing performance goes far beyond themes
I frequently get questions along the lines of the following: “How do your themes handle performance? I really need a fast theme.”
Doesn’t everybody?
Page speed is something every website operator should be concerned with. But how important is the theme itself when it comes to web performance? Perhaps not as critical as you might think.
How we build performance into our themes
- Make use of transients when appropriate
- Avoid unbounded queries
- Generally keep queries under control
- Utilize Google Fonts CDN
- Write efficient, only-as-needed CSS
How we intentionally compromise performance in our themes
Most notably, we don’t minify or concatenate scripts and styles out of the box. We’re biased for ease of customization, even if it compromises performance.
Non-theme related factors that affect page speed
Optimized images — Use something like Kraken to optimize images.
PHP 7 or nah? — Studies show that simply enabling PHP 7 can drastically improve performance.
Caching everything realistically possible — Just activating a page caching solution like WP Super Cache will work wonders.
Server Power — The most optimized theme in the world won’t help you if your server does not have adequate resources.
So there you have it
Theme performance shouldn’t be measured in a vacuum. Performance is best handled on a site-by-site basis, after considering every level of the website stack: application (WordPress, themes, plugins), server, and even DNS.
Hyper-focusing on how “fast” a theme is, while ignoring other performance factors, could be a costly mistake.