One of the easiest ways that you can inject a bit of speed into your WordPress website is to choose a fast theme. Using any old theme can severely impact your website and not in a good way.
Unless you are an old-hand at WordPress or a developer, you may not know what you need, especially if you are intending to purchase a theme rather than using a freebie.
These are the factors you need to take into consideration:
Buy Only What You Need
By the time you get to choosing a theme, your website content should be planned out, so you have some idea of what you need – if it isn’t, so it now before you go any further.
If you don’t, you will end up purchasing a theme that is ‘multi-purpose’, simply because you have no idea what you need. This will not do anything for website speed.
Also, keep in mind that you will likely be adding plugins too, so your theme really needs to be as lightweight and fast as possible.
Speed Testing the Theme Demo
All themes will have a demo site to show you what it looks like. Speed test the demo using something like GTMetrix or Pingdom tools and make sure you test multiple pages, not just one.
It isn’t easy to say how fast it should be but, if you have a website that has a lot of content, i.e. loads of sections, images, etc., you want it loading in less than 3 seconds, preferably less than 2.
Speed will also vary for different test locations, the location the demo site is hosted from, whether a CDN is in use, caching and so on. Test a few themes and, on the information, you have available, you will be able to see whether there are any that are faster than others.
HTTP Requests
The number of HTTP requests equates to how many times the browser asks the server for images, CSS, and other files – the higher the number the longer the process takes.
Ideally, you want a low number of requests to keep the speed up. A web server is capable of serving multiple requests so around 60 requests shouldn’t take so long but, push that number up to 80 or higher and you start to see a significant slowdown.
Page Size
In simple terms, if you have a lot of data on your webpage, the longer it is going to take to download. Data incudes information, images, posts, etc. and each page is measured in KB and MB. Generally, you want to aim for less than 1 MB. Go beyond 2 and you will start to have problems with speed.
Some people tend to cram as much information as they can onto one page of their website and all they are doing is slowing down the load times and irritating their website visitors to the stage where they my just up and leave.
What You Can Control
When you start to look at themes for your WordPress website, you need to know what aspects you can control. Some themes will let you leave the widgets off the sidebar, for example, which will speed load times up.
Many people see the demo of a theme and want to recreate it but, if you are careful, if you make choices that are more speed-conscious, you could have a great looking site that loads super-fast without losing any of the content or information.
If you use Pingdom, have a look at the Page Analysis. In particular, look at how much CSS and JS is loaded and how many images there are, as well as their overall size.
You can control the images because you use your own and you can compress them before you upload them With CSS and JS, however, you don’t get that control.
This is inherent to the theme you choose, and you can only hope that, should you disable a specific feature that the JS files relating to that feature will not be loaded – you can’t possibly know that before you use the theme though. Assume, therefore, that the size of the JS and CSS are pretty constant.
WordPress Theme Recommendations
Choosing a theme is not easy but it is important to get the right one; here are some theme shops we have worked with and fully recommend: