Pro Theme Speed & Performance Issues

[kademcconville]

Hi there,

We have been working to fix a performance issue on a site. The technical team asked us to create a staging site to debug the issue,

We did, and the results were as follows:

Hello Kade,

I have done some testing, even to get the gtmetrix test to run on the staging was difficult, when I disable all the plugins the gtmetrix will connect.

So I went through and enabled them all one by one, got to the health and troubleshooting plugin and the tests stop working.
But when I disabled this plugin the test continued to not work.

I added a new theme, and switched to this, with all plugins enabled gtmetrix works brilliantly and you get really great scores.

I am not sure what it is, but it does look like the issue is with the theme being used.

GTmetrix Performance Report

…

Please could you help with this as Pro hasn’t been an issue previously.

Regards,
Kade.

[tristup]

Hi Kade,

Thanks for reaching out.
The page speed issues are mostly related to the content,image, scripts used in your site and not related to the theme. Still, I would suggest you follow the points given in the Structure tab of the GTMatrix result.

Thanks

[kademcconville]

Hey there,

The result there is not using Pro theme. The Gtmetrix result provided is incredible - improving the live site (using Pro theme) by about 2-3 seconds just by changing the theme.

Changing to Pro theme is definitely affecting load time dramatically here.

The result provided is fantastic, so I don’t need to go through that structure tab as these results are excellent.

Cheers.

[kademcconville]

The exact same site (cloned), same database, same plugins, same hosting platform.

(1) Default 2022 theme:

(2) Pro Theme:

Hope you can understand the issue.

Thanks.

[marc_a]

Hey @kademcconville,

You can check our article on how you can improve your site performance. Please check this out.

• https://theme.co/docs/how-to-improve-site-performance

Hope that helps.

[kademcconville]

Hey,

This does not help. Site performance is great as you can see from the performance reports above.

Enabling Pro theme makes the site performance bad.

This appears to be a Pro theme issue.

Every other part of the performance (as per the guide you provided) is covered.

Again, to avoid someone replying without reading the issue or the evidence I have provided above:
ENABLING PRO THEME IS A MAJOR ISSUE TO SITE PERFORMANCE.

[rad]

Hi @kademcconville,

Rad here, and this was brought to my attention since I also worked on other optimizations. I have worked on multiple sites with different themes and including Pro. There are many contributing factors that can affect the scoring of the site’s performance but let’s pick the content as one of the factors. Then to summarize it, the amount of content on a page proportionally affects the scores and performance. The less content, the fewer scripts, animation, and less rendering will results to a higher score.

Let’s review the two site’s as a sample,

https://embark.studio/

That page contains slider with animation, grids, an animated menu, multiple sections, and images.

https://embark-staging.onyx-sites.io/

While in this one, contains CSS based menu, a single image, and text content. The same score you’ll get if you check and test a text file.

You can confirm this by recreating the same content while utilizing the 2022 Theme. Like, add sections, then with backgrounds and sliders instead of pure texts.

Then videos, maps, trackings, and such can potentially affect scoring as well, it just happens that they are added within the Pro elements as content, which when the theme is disabled, those culprits are disabled as well and all other embedded functionalities since it’s part builder’s contents as a whole.

I like to pick another sample, with less content while Pro is active, but it’s not currently reachable through GTMetrix and Pagespeed.

In my previous optimizations, I’m able to reach 90 to 99 with Pro theme, with the right optimization plugins and configuration. Some even have more complex content.

Though, I agree that since Pro offers so many features with ease of use, we can easily go over the top when creating content. What I do for that is reduce the content by removing hidden elements/sections that aren’t being used, minimizing the animation, and re-create the content with mobile-first in mind. Then I do custom CSS instead of re-creating/duplicating and hiding contents when they are basically the same contents but just different layouts (column to row).

Thanks!