Why Use a Premium Theme?

As I have discussed in other training or WA blog posts, one of the factors of SEO is your page load speed.

You can test this from a few sites:

Pingdom:

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Google Developers PageSpeed Insights:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insi...

GTmetrix:

https://gtmetrix.com/

Here's the output example from Pingdom:

NOTE: I highly recommend running each of the three above and getting an average. Do this for about three days to get a real feel of your actual load times. Also, don't run it several times within the same five minutes. They cache (remember) the last run. You should wait at least 15 minutes before running the same test on your site.

Each one tests for a few different factors. I wouldn't get too involved into what each one is testing for. At least that's not the foundation of this particular training.

I have done lots of testing with caching plug-ins, compression and optimization. I successfully shaved off several milliseconds on my page load speed, but later discovered the huge difference a decent WordPress theme can make.

Many free themes are not "Responsive" OR simply not coded by the web developers for efficiency and page load speed.

If' you're unfamiliar with what the term "Responsive" means in reference to a WordPress theme, please see this:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/pjgermain/blog/wha...

Okay, so the bottom line here is that many of the free themes are great. But, after you have become accustomed to WordPress and have a solid site and are tweaking it for page load speed, you just might wanna check out a website I mentioned on my primary website's resources list. They have some free themes and plugins, but also some stellar premium themes (yea, that means they cost a wee bit o' cashola!) that are super fast. These themes are optimized for speed! (And, also are very functional and purdy!)

One of the factors involved here is minimizing HTML server calls (A.K.A. "Requests) Mine reduced from 89 to 47. These can slow down your site. Notice on my site, the embedded social links. So, I don't have SumoMe (or any other social plugin) doing this for me. The social links are built in.

Okay, moving on.... So let's say your have downloaded your brand spanking new theme and need to upload. But, you have no clue about Filezilla and FTP. No worries, you MAY not need FTP at all.

Let's dive into it!

Don't worry! YOU can do this!!!

P.S. (Thanks Hindy!)

You might wanna try this on a free SiteRubix test website first. Then, you can confidently perform the following steps on your live "production" website!