Hello world! 🙂
So, after checking the demos of most of the themes, especially the ones available at ThemeForest, I think most theme developers don’t have an idea of how to improve themes. They blame it on internet speed, sometimes on hosting which could be a reason but again they recommend something like Hostgator (I have used it for a few months and it’s pathetic) and never even mention getting a server closer to your audience to improve TTFB. Instead, some have a 200 to 400kb CSS stylesheet loading in which barely 1 to 10% is being used. Why not add the critical CSS where it is used by default instead of loading the entire theme stylesheet? I know bootstrap has 200kb for basic styles, but instead of adding all styles together, why not add those styles which we need at the current point? They leave it on cache plugins like WP Rocket and Litespeed cache to optimize CSS which I don’t think does any good and most of the time destroys website styling and functions. Some theme demos I have seen have also delayed lazy load and js features till interaction to fool the page speed insights.
Kudos to some theme developers (literal gems) that have managed to remove unused CSS and generate and load separate CSS for each page. Some have even adopted the habit of giving options of using system fonts or downloading google fonts and serving them locally. Some also did hard work of making their own icon bundle instead of using them from fontawesome. For animations, some even moved from CSS to GSAP. Some even made separate styles and scripts for all blocks, widgets, modules, shortcodes, and Gutenberg blocks and enabled them only if the block is used on the page.
Google is also to be blamed for some of this mess created. Back in 2015, Google and GTmetrix released an update that affected page scores when more files were being used. That update recommended using fewer files and developers started to merge those files together for better scores. Now after the web vital update, Google suddenly doesn’t care about no. of files/requests loaded but the size of each file being loaded. So now, the good developers are separating each file for a specific style and functioning even if it’s a few lines of code, and only loading them where they are being used.
Another approach is to stop using theme builders and instead use advanced page builders. Elementor and WPbakery still hurt the speed a bit, but I think the default Gutenberg has the potential, especially after the full-site update. Many developers, I see, are moving to provide free and premium templates and Gutenberg block addons. Almost all of them that I have used (Greenshift, Spectra, Kadence, Stackable, Genesis) have well-optimized blocks. Though the CSS differs a bit still all of them will only add CSS where they are used. Some of them have the option to either make them inline CSS or external requests. I’m making a few personal websites for myself from Gutenberg and will share how well they look and perform soon.
Before buying any theme, I recommend you check their demos. Most of them perform worst on the Mobile version. Ask them what they did to improve their theme speed.
Thanks for reading this long post, hope you have a nice day!
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