Thread: WordPress 3 2010 theme loading speed

Has anyone done any speed test to see how fast the new WordPress 3 2010 theme loads, as compared to other themes?

The speed test that I have used show that my blog takes like 8 seconds to load - which is too slow. I'am thinking about editing the 2010 theme and using it, but I do not want to put a lot of work into it if its not going to improve the load times.

I like light themes that do not use a lot of images. 1 problem with the 2010 theme - it has a huge header banner. So the banner would have to be the first thing to be edited or removed.

But after the header banner, the 2010 theme seems to be pretty light.

I've got a new blog set up that use the Twenty Ten theme. It does not appear to loading slowly for me. YSlow gives the home page a grade of 87 (B). It also rates the load time at 1.226 seconds.

I am not using a page cache on that site, but I have been stripping out some of the CSS from the bloated style sheet. However, that should only affect the first time load. I do have image caching set up in the .htaccess, as well as a few other tricks that were recommended by YSlow. I also rewrote the header.php file.

Try adding the following to your .htaccess to see if it speeds things up. It shuts off the eTag and caches the images.

Code:

# removes eTags from headers
Header unset ETag
FileETag none

# Expire images header - forces 1 month caching
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/ico A2592000
ExpiresByType text/css A2592000
ExpiresByType text/javascript A2592000

For some reason that I have not yet had the time to troubleshoot, my WordPress sites run noticeably slower when I use either wp-super-cache or w3-total-cache, so I do not currently use either. If you are using a caching plugin, try turning it off.

try the swift theme i heard they are cool as they avoid images in so the theme ought to be cool.

Kev, did you fix your loading issues?

Originally Posted by TopDogger

Kev, did you fix your loading issues?

Yea, I think so,,, or at least improved it.

A long time ago I had installed some plug-ins that had scripts, but I disabled those plugins later on. While looking at what all was loading on my site, those disabled plugins were still trying to load.

So I fired up FTP, logged into the site and deleted all of the plugins that I was not using. After that, the site loaded a lot faster.

On another site there was a suggestion to remove all of the plugins your not using. And sure enough, that fixed some of my loading issues.

There have been several recent articles that reveal the disabled plugin issue with WordPress. WordPress automatically loads every plugin in the plugins directory, whether is is enabled or not, so it is always a good idea to delete unused plugins.

It is more faster than previous version old wordpress and if you have thesis theme than you will be wondered with its speed .

Originally Posted by badmash

It is more faster than previous version old wordpress and if you have thesis theme than you will be wondered with its speed .

Yeah, the 1.226 seconds home page loading time that I am getting without using any page caching is impressive. The home page for most of my WordPress sites load in the 3 to 5 seconds range.

CSS is not cached, only raw code such as generated by PHP and database access. But a good cache plugin could remove redundant code such as comments.

CSS is cached. It is cached by a browser.

Some cache plugins can minify CSS external files to reduce their size. I have not yet tried to do that. I think the CSS file size for Twenty Ten is excessive. There is a lot of redundancy in there.