I have said it before and I will say it again: Everybody loves a fast website.
Today we are going to look at unlocking even more speed by custom creating your own theme.
For the purpose of this post we will be concentrating on 1 variable only – number of HTTP requests. In my experience the number of requests a site makes during loading has an even greater impact on site loading speed than the page size. I have seen 3MB pages with a small number of requests loading faster than 600kb files with a large number of requests.
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I will compare a number of popular themes either purchased from Envato or available for free download versus our custom created WordPress theme. Bear in mind that in all of these cases the number of requests hasn’t been reduced through combining and minifying JS and CSS files.
The good (my theme)
I recently created a theme from scratch using Bootstrap as my HTML5 boilerplate and the WordPress Underscores framework. I really liked working with Underscores because you start with the bare essentials, leaving you free to build a kickass theme with no bloated code or plugins.
Number of requests: 23 (prior to optimizing)
The bad (purchased theme) – Mobius
Number of requests: 61
Mobius is an awesome theme from a front end perspective. It comes packed with a bunch of jquery plugins, css animations and icons which allow you to do almost anything. The only problem with this is that it loads a tonne of unnecessary code and plugins which in turn enqeue their own JS, CSS and image files.
I am pretty careful with installing only plugins that are required. After finalizing a design for a client, the Mobius theme with a minimal number of plugins installed calls 61 HTTP requests.
The ugly (free theme) – Generate Press
Number of requests: 80
Generate Press is an awesome free theme which is really good for getting a wordpress site up and running. However, if left unchecked Generate Press will call up to 80 HTTP requests which will have a huge impact on site loading speed.
It is important to mention that although this theme has an excessive number of requests the page load time was 1.3s. Now this is mostly due to the generatepress demo site being hosted on a kick ass server. But I must admit that in GP’s defense when properly optimised I have reduced this theme to 27 requests.
The Winner is Clear
From a number of requests view, creating your own theme is the clear winner. In my opinion its best to get the number of requests below 30, which only seems to be possible by creating your own theme. A good WP dev will be able to build all of the functions you need right into the theme. Yes it will take more time and money but ultimately you will have a theme built on a solid framework with all of the functions you need and nothing else.
