Wordpress - Is there such a thing as a 'slow' theme?

Diceicle

Is there such a thing as a slow theme?
As in how the theme is put together makes it less optimized than a competing theme.

Can a theme just naturally be sluggish?

M.T.D

Simple answer is yes.
Many of the frameworks that try to be all things to everyone have a lot of bloat, some themes are just badly coded.
This would apply mostly to commercial or "free" themes on the open market.

Themes in the WordPress repository follow the guidelines and should behave properly, and control style rather than content.
To get extra functionality you can then add plugins or using a child theme add only the extra functions you want.

Diceicle

Thank you.

Whats an appropriate way to diagnose or determine a slow theme?

I'm doing a small project and am between using Divi and a (suspected slower) theme Ronneby.
Is there a way that I can reasonably say 'yes, thats a slow theme'

seamus

There are loads of tools for this kind of diagnosis.

First up is to make sure that it's not any of the assets causing the site to run slowly - sometimes images, scripts or other "linked" items are slow to load, and drag the whole thing down.

You can use the "network" tab in developer console in Chrome to analyse this, or tools like https://tools.pingdom.com/

Once you're sure the assets load promptly, then it's on to looking at client-side scripts (JS, etc), as they're frequently a bottleneck; something in one of these scripts taking a long time to complete. There are sites which can do this, but again the Chrome developer console can help. I'm sure there are no end of plugins for it too.

Once you've eliminated these, it's on to analysing server-side code. Which is unfortunately a little tougher and can be expensive. Tools like NewRelic tend to offer small free subscriptions which may be enough to help you diagnose your site.

Talisman

There are many variables which determine the perceived speed of a website.

The first step would be to evaluate the performance using a tool like WebPageTest - this works if the website is accessible online. If it's on an internal network or local to your computer you can setup a private instance as detailed in the documentation on Github.

The primary speed killers on the PHP side is rogue code that is executed on every page whether it is required or not, this is an issue with the commercial themes that endeavour to be all things to all men. A lot of the code is not optimised to utilise caching because it works for the demo data and it needs to work on the shared hosting environments where caching is seen as a luxury/premium level feature. They paper over the crevasse by suggesting the use of plugins such as Total Cache or Super Cache, these eliminate the PHP bottleneck by generating and caching the generated HTML for each visited page on the file system. Subsequent visits to a page serve the cached HTML file instead of hitting WordPress and the database.

Ideally you want to be in control of the hosting environment so that you can tune the performance of the server to meet your needs. By that I mean you control the web server configuration, the PHP version and modules loaded, the HTTP headers, caching with Redis/Memcache etc. With shared hosting all of this is out of your control.

The low hanging fruit on the front end is optimising image sizes and eliminating unnecessary JavaScript code. All of the analytics/social sharing code has an impact on the page loading performance - there are solutions to solving the issues but they are not found in the ready made themes.

daymobrew

Diceicle wrote: »

I'm doing a small project and am between using Divi and a (suspected slower) theme Ronneby.

Something slower than Divi!! I've helped out on sites running Divi and they have all been a nightmare.

Ronneby comes with Visual Composer page builder. Yes, it's very popular but it's a hog, and you will not be able to stop using it because of its shortcodes.

If you are okay with html and css I suggest looking for a theme without a page builder.

l0l0

Yes, plenty of them. Before installing you should check the theme description where authors generally write about the performance of the theme. Also there are many tools available to check if your website is slow.

MichaelJD

I have probably used so many badly programmed, slow WordPress themes than I can count. I finally settled for something as simple as FocusBlog by Thrive Themes