WordPress Theme Baseline Google PageSpeed Tests - Is Your Website Fast Enough?

Hey everyone, on the back of the latest Google Algorithm update, and Kyle's latest post about WordPress Theme's, I thought I would help out to give you an idea of whether you're trying to win a losing battle or not. So I decided to ask our great community here at Wealthy Affiliate "Which theme do you use?", so that I could collate the most used themes that our members are using here at WA.

The response was quite good, so thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion :-)

The Themes Being Tested

The following 15 Themes will be the ones tested on this occasion:

• Ascension
• Astra
• BlogGem
• Esfahan
• Generate Press
• GuCherry Blog
• Hestia
• Hiero
• Innovatory
• Neve
• Storefront
• Twenty Twenty
• Unos
• Unos Business
• Weaver Xtreme

The idea behind this is to find out whether the theme you are using is well coded, and meets Google's PageSpeed Insights Tests. If the theme doesn't meet the 100/100 score when it is installed on to a fresh installation of WordPress, then it doesn't matter what you do to try and improve your score, you will never get to 100/100 for Mobile and Desktop.

The Process

The process I followed was as follows:

1. Created a Brand New Website here at WA using the SiteRubix Subdomain
2. Turned on WA's SitePlus+ Extreme Caching
3. Logged In to WordPress as an Administrator
4. Located and Installed all the Themes that we are going to test
5. Activated the Theme for the Current Test
6. Logged Out of WordPress
7. Visited the Homepage of the Test Website
8. Pressed "Ctrl + F5" Twice to Force a Refresh
9. Right-Clicked on the Homepage and Selected "View Source", to ensure that the Server Cache had been applied correctly
10. Visited Google's PageSpeed Insights and entered the Domain Name (using the HTTPS Address) and Clicked Analyze
11. Took a Screenshot of the Results
12. Clicked on Analyze for a Second Time
13. Took another Screenshot of the Results
14. Logged In to WordPress as an Administrator
15. Repeated Steps 5 to 14 for each of the Themes being Tested
    

The Results

Each test will have two results. Test 1 shows the initial load time, for a first-time visitor, bearing in mind the server cache for the page has already been created. Test 2 shows the results for a repeat visit, taking in to account browser caching.

Please Note: The results below are ONLY for the Mobile Score

The results of these tests can be found below.

Ascension

Test 1

Test 2

Astra

Test 1

Test 2

BlogGem

Test 1

Test 2

Esfahan

Test 1

Test 2

Generate Press

Test 1

Test 2

GuCherry Blog

Test 1

Test 2

Hestia

Test 1

Test 2

Hiero

Test 1

Test 2

Innovatory

Test 1

Test 2

Neve

Test 1

Test 2

Storefront

Test 1

Test 2

Twenty Twenty

Test 1

Test 2

Unos

Test 1

Test 2

Unos Business

Test 1

Test 2

Weaver Xtreme

Test 1

Test 2

Summary

Below, you can find the summary of each test, in the format of Theme - Test 1 - Test 2

• Ascension - 89 - 99
• Astra - 95 - 100
• BlogGem - 91 - 100
• Esfahan - 88 - 99
• Generate Press - 98 - 100
• GuCherry Blog - 69 - 97
• Hestia - 82 - 99
• Hiero - 89 - 100
• Innovatory - 81 - 98
• Neve - 99 - 100
• Storefront - 95 - 100
• Twenty Twenty - 99 - 100
• Unos - 87 - 99
• Unos Business - 84 - 100
• Weaver Xtreme - 84 - 97

Conclusion

Based purely on the list and results above, the only themes I would consider using are:

• Astra
  
• BlogGem
• Generate Press
  
• Neve
  
• Storefront
• Twenty Twenty

Based on real life usage, due to customisations and flexibility of the theme, the one I would recommend to use is Generate Press

One thing that I haven't covered in this post, is that whilst activating the themes to be tested within WordPress, quite a few of them were requesting that I should also download and install additional plugins. For the purposes of the tests, I did not download or install these additional plugins.

I hope these results will help you with your decision making process, not just which theme to chose for a new website, but also whether you should consider changing your theme.

If you have a theme that is not covered in these tests, please visit the Question thread "Which theme do you use?" and post your Theme name there. I will then look at doing the same tests again for those themes.