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Hi all,
Some really, really good looking sites in here.
That said, and truly not to take away from anyone’s efforts, nearly every site I have looked at in this thread has serious speed optimization issues. In the end, speed is as important as aesthetics. Left unresolved, many of you are in for very unhappy users, unnerving bounce rates and poor search engine positioning.
So, I thought I’d chime back in with some free online tools that can help you get on track:
http://websitetest.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
http://gtmetrix.com/
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/Please excuse my directness, I understand it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I just hate to see beautiful sites fail for no other reason than their being slow, which is something I’ve witnessed during my career more times than I can now remember.
Best,
AJThanks AJ,
There is also resource here in our Knowledge Base that covers best practices with regards to performance optimization. We recommend all customers check that out as it covers this topic in more detail.
Kyle
OK X People,
Here’s another one from Two Guys and a Mouse in Tucson AZ.Two Guys and a Mouse strike again!
Great job, Michael. The icons are a nice touch for the nav items, and that’s a creative customization of the header widget area.
Hello, my name is Eric.
I’ve been thinking about redesigning my site for some time now. Recently, I’ve made the time to actually do it lol. I wanna say thanks for such an awesome theme, X has so much potential and I’m looking forward to it’s future development.Any feedback is much appreciated.
Website: http://lil2good.com
Hi Eric,
The colors/look/feel all balance each other very well! The only thing I’m seeing on first pass is to compress some of those big, beautiful, images 🙂
For example, your background is 1.1 MB when ideally it should be around 50-100kb (about 10% of that size). That can really slow down how long it takes for the page to load especially when there are so many..a common problem for graphic designers.
There are several ways to compress images that minimize or even sometimes eliminate any fuzziness that can sometimes come with improperly compressing images.
Cheers,
Kyle@JamesB http://james-brandon.com/ Gotta say that I love the share button plugin you are using!! (plugin author 😛 )
Hey Kyle,
I did a before and after speedtest, I have to say after compressing everything. The site is much faster.
Thanks for the help 🙂Hi Kyle,
That’s a good basic tutorial you guys have. A couple things I hope you’ll consider editing or putting a caveat to, however:
1.) Enabling ‘Auto’ minify in W3TC may work for a naked install (of X or any theme/instance), but once one starts adding plugins the odds are above 90% that a site will ‘break’. I realize you guys cannot provide an all-inclusive-works-for-every-set-up tutorial, but everyone using the theme will be adding plugins and subsequently wondering why this specific instruction doesn’t/didn’t work (at all or for very long).
2.) Enabling ‘Database Cache’ via W3 Total Cache whilst using a traditional CDN (MaxCDN is mentioned) is a big ol’ no-no. Indeed, database caching is likely to either prove problematic or provide no performance benefit at all in most environments.Anyway, probably not the thread for me to continue with this. Would it be against forum rules to start an optimization thread?
Best,
AJHi AJ,
There’s always the possibility of things going wrong when you start adding plugins to the mix, however this is significantly less likely when using reliable plugins that make proper use of WordPress APIs. Usually the troublemaker plugins are the ones that go about things their own way. If you’re using X by itself, you can even forego the minification altogether because our assets are pre-minified.
The enabling database cache with a CDN is not something we specifically recommend either, we simply talk about the use for CDNs. It would be advisable to use if a CDN is not being used which is the position of the article.
We’d like to keep things centralized in terms of resources, so if you have any additional thoughts you’d like to share for our team to review with regards to performance, feel free to email us.
Many thanks,
Kyle@ Eric … great job with the site. I really like the estimator tool (might have to steal it myself 🙂
Couple things I noticed …
1) I’d add a bit of vertical padding on the logo
2) Review a few grammatical / syntactical issues in the Design / Development content band (uses of semicolon and ampersand).
3) The red button in the Design / Development content band seems to clash with the red background color just a bit (I like the idea of pulling the teal / aqua from the lamp in the accompanying graphic … but that’s just a subjective opinion)Really awesome job, though!
Eric – No problem…glad to help!
David – James B of http://james-brandon.com fame will be doing our Customer Showcase after you, so I’ll be sure to mention that in case he missed your post! Great to see the interconnectedness of the Themeco community 🙂
@Isaac Thanks for the feedback really appreciated 🙂
Sometimes you need a an extra pair of eyes to see what you’ve missed.
Hi guys, I’m Maulana from Indonesia. I use theme x since January 2014. Here are some examples that I have developed in this country.
http://blog.dream.web.id | http://pasarnusantara.co.id | http://toyotacokro.com | and now I’m developing http://demo.kallaproperty.com
The conclusion is I really love this theme. Thank you Theme X.
Simple one: http://www.arennda.com/
