Not sure if this should be in in WP section or not, but i dropped it in here as it was a more opinion related then technical.
I’ve taken a liking to studying web perf and reading/watching the books/videos of ppl like Steve Souders, Paul Irish, Lara Swanson among many others, and one night, whilst combing through some WP Themes for sale, I dropped a few in the Google Speed Insights page to see some scores: pretty poor results for a few. It then pushed me to have this on going convo about their poor perf, and that the speed was likely tertiary among design/coding decisions.
I eventually thought that at some point, sellers should put up the their insights score when w/ their theme. I liken it to a car fax when buying a car. I got a touch of push back about it, but being that behaviour is all about mobile, speed has to be a factor. And I’m pretty sure the majority of buyers aren’t devs and just want to the damn theme to work.
It’s a good question and not a crazy idea at all – maybe something we’ll see one day
I think the main problem is that there are so many variables when it comes to site speed that it would be hard for a theme developer to give a definitive score that users can rely on. Factors such as hosting, content and theme configuration all play such big parts.
Choice of theme is very important when it comes to speed, so you’re asking the right questions. Personally I try and spend a bit of extra time researching theme choice and using themes and frameworks from reputable developers.
Page speed is not just about “mobile”, not everyone has uber fast broadband connections so that applies to any device. You’re right though, any plug n play system like wordpress can suffer from excessive bloat so some sort of “speed” rating could be useful for potential buyers.
agreed all the way around. Although speed would be such a generic metric, and we all know so much can factor into a page’s speed, but there are some good practices that we can look for.
Even today a friend asked me to help her w/ a site and she wants to use a Square Space theme. I asked for the link and took a closer look. Again, not the best practices, but nothing that can’t be tweaked. It’s in fact kind of fun.
Either way, I’ve been lazy in spending more any time dev’ing WP sites, and I actually want to take a closer look at them - seeing that they power so much of the web - around 20% from what I recall reading.So many plugins… Now, add the new players like Square Space etc… lots of auditing.
