Rebuilding Your WordPress Site For Speed

So your there, your at that point where you’ve done everything you can do to your site to speed it up, but you’ve hit a road block.

You’ve made sure every image is compressed you’ve uninstalled or removed plugins you don’t use, you’ve installed caching plugins to give your site that extra kick, you’ve followed Google Page Speed Insights, or GMetrix to the latter but yet your site is still underperforming. What else can you do?

Is it possible to achieve the perfect score?

Well, have you checked to make sure your theme is light and fast?

You may be thinking why would I need to do that I know my theme is light and fast. But is it?

Many people purely buy themes based on the look and feel of the theme and why not that is the whole point of a theme if it looks good whats the problem?

True but do you take a second to think how large the theme is? When you see a theme with over 500 different variations and options are you thinking about the speed?

All those extra features can be slowing you down, it’s not worth it to spend $100 on a theme with loads of options for you to only have a 5-page site at the end of it, especially if you want it to be lightning fast.

A lot of the BIG themes have an area where you can turn off certain features, like extra post types you don’t need, unused shortcodes, Fonts etc which is incredibly useful if you want to shave that extra millisecond of your load time.

BUT IT’S STILL NOT FAST ENOUGH!

So what’s the Ultimate thing you can do what’s the best way to get the fastest theme ever?

Well, your rebuild it.

Yes Rebuild it, buy rebuilding the theme you would only be adding the scripts and styles you need to run the theme efficiently you can combine any features into your theme and strip out everything else that could be causing issues, this has been the case recently. As a lot of clients have been asking for faster websites, and be building website themes from scratch, your getting a stupidly fast theme that only has the essentials to run.

Can’t you just rebuild what you have?

There’s nothing stopping you from altering your current theme and stripping out stuff you don’t want, But do remember that if you want to continue receiving updates from the theme developer then I highly suggest not doing this, or at least if you wanted to duplicate the theme and then start making your amends to it least then you can keep an up to date version.

So to wrap up,

The is no real best practise on making your site super fast as the internet is an ever changing thing thats gonna constantly want you to do improvements to your site in the future it will be Google Page Speed insights one year then it’ll be Google Mobile Usability test another year then it’ll be something new and interesting the next year its a long uphill battle to constantly make any site super fast.

Good luck to us all.