What's in a theme?

WordPress themes offer template structures and plugins to help you create a website quickly and easily. But, how much do they actually affect your page load speed? WordPress themes can be both a boon and a bane when it comes to page loading time.

If you have an outdated theme with poorly written code, your site might take longer to load than necessary due to the extra scripts and resources being loaded into the theme. On the other hand, if you use a modern, optimised theme or framework that is designed for performance, the opposite will be true - your pages will load faster than those using older themes.

We have spent many years working with different themes and frameworks, gradually working towards an optimum solution for functionality and performance. Not needing to compromise on functionality to provide fast load times has been key in our decision making.

The type of plugins used on your website also plays an important role in how long it takes for pages to load. If you have too many plugins, or if they are heavy on resources, this will negatively impact your page speed. It's important to be conscious of the plugins you choose and make sure that they are optimised for performance. we always recommend removing unused plugins as they can cause conflicts and are also an extra risk to security should that unused plugin introduce an exploitable vulnerability.

Here are five points where a theme choice and plugin usage can affect page loading time

1. Number of resources – Each theme has a number of scripts, stylesheets and other files associated with it. Having fewer files to load can make the theme faster than one that loads several extra files each time a page is requested

2. Size of resources – The size of these theme-related files also plays an important role in how quickly pages load. The larger the file sizes, the longer it will take for them to be downloaded

3. Minification – The process of minifying theme files can help reduce their size and make your pages load faster. This involves removing unnecessary characters from the code, such as extra spaces and line breaks. Some themes will break if you minify CSS or javascript files and these should be avoided where possible.

4. Caching – Many themes now come with built-in caching capabilities which can significantly improve page loading times by storing frequently accessed information in memory or on disk so that it doesn't need to be requested every time a page is loaded. These can be good and bad depending on how well they work with some of the more advanced caching plugins. We would recommend going for a theme that works well with a dedicated caching plugin.

5. Plugin usage – As mentioned above, plugins also play an important role when it comes to page speed optimisation. If you're using too many plugins, or if they are outdated or not optimised properly, this can lead to decreased page loading times

By being conscious of template choice and plugin usage, you can ensure that your WordPress website loads quickly and efficiently. This will benefit both visitors and search engine rankings.

Asset ICT's page builder is built to be optimised for speed while still offering a rich set of features. Combined with the Asset ICT hosting, you'll see measurable performance gains that can help your website stay competitive in an ever-changing environment.