Th3 Core

I was testing some Wordpress themes that claim to be fast.

Most of them do not live up to their promises. One claims it doe not use JQuery and achieves a Pagespeed score of 100. Testing their demo page, I got a Pagespeed score of 64 and one of the render blocking scripts was... JQuery.

But this theme
https://tajam.id/miniva/

actually pulled it off. It got a 97 for the demo site home page and 100 for a demo site internal page. It also got something like a 98 on the Yslow tool.

I won't say it's a gorgeous theme, but it's not terrible either and that's a higher score than I've ever seen for Wordpress.

Ha ha! Oxygen is also good as in the gas. Up to a point.

Oxygen looks much better than Elementor and other page builders based on their claims. It's interesting, though, that they block requests from googleapis.com so you can't actually run Pagespeed on their demos.

When I went through GTMetrix, I got a Pagespeed score of 57 and a YSlow score of 70 with a Fully Loaded time of 9.6 seconds for their Minimal demo. They claim it gets an 86 in Pagespeed and a 79 in YSlow.

Of course, I haven't tried it on my own install, but that's been my experience with page builders - speed claims, but a lot of bloat in actual implementations, even their own demos. You would think they would pull out all the stops to make their Minimal demo blazing fast.

Miniva is, of course, really a spartan theme and though it has some bells and whistles, it's far from having that sort of page builder capability. So if you want a beautiful site without coding, it's not going to do it. But if you want a fast site without ripping all manner of things out of your theme (JQuery, Google Fonts, etc etc), it's a good starting point.

The Miniva demo home page has only two errors:
 - malformed datetime for post dates
 - a role="presentation" when it should be aria-role="presentation"

Those could be fixed quite easily. To be clear, I haven't used it yet and find it a bit spare and a bit old school, but I just have yet to see something that comes close to those Pagespeed and YSlow scores out of the box.

Those are some nice illustrations of how much better CSS layout tools have gotten since the old days of using floats and clear floats and hasLayout to try to get source-ordered equal-height columns that stack on mobile.

More along the same lines (article links to other glitch.me demos):
https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/common-responsive-layouts-with-css-grid-and-some-without-245a862f48df

With flexbox and grid, things just are so much simpler. See Chris Coyier's grid demo
https://codepen.io/chriscoyier/pen/FAbpm

>>uses system fonts

On a slow connection, fonts are often one of the worst hangups. "Waiting for google.com..." usually means a Google font is blocking display render.

>>no media queries

With the minmax() parameter available, you can often avoid media queries entirely in a CSS grid layout. See how this guy builds a responsive layout using media queries and grid, then deletes the media queries by using

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(300px, 1fr));

https://travishorn.com/responsive-grid-in-2-minutes-with-css-grid-layout-4842a41420fe

As spare as spare can be... but it's 5 requests and under 7KB total
https://sustywp.com/

I would take that with a grain of salt, because those energy needs do not scale very linearly with the payload of a web page.

There are still some bills I prefer to receive on paper and I've looked into how "green" paperless billing is. The short version is that the vast majority of the energy is consumed by the end user's computer and especially the monitor. With a standard computer and a large monitor, the carbon footprint of reading your bill online can be greater than getting it on paper, especially if you archive the paper (and thus keep it for 20 years as a carbon sink) rather than shredding it and sending it to the landfill.

So if you could get everyone to use smaller, more efficient monitors, that would be a big savings, whereas saving some KB off your web page will be almost nothing. I don't know exactly how data centers scale in that respect. I know for a while, Bitcoin mining had a massive carbon footprint.

Yes, that assumes that you are using a large monitor. So basically, it comes out like this

On a MacBook Air with a 10W power draw, you can roughly speaking read for 40 minutes before hitting the carbon footprint of printing a sheet of paper (obviously, this will be different in Poland than in Germany, in Michigan than in California).

On a dual 24" monitor setup, it's about 1 page per minute of monitor time.

The original source for that has gone 503, but this gives some idea
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140907231114-19675079-comparing-direct-vs-email-carbon-footprints/

Slightly Off Topic ...

>I've looked into how "green" paperless billing is.
I've always had the same thought regarding eBook vs Paperbooks (pBooks). I can't confirm it, but my impression is that the energy consumed reading an ebook on a device would be more than the embedded energy (emergy) in the pBook, especially if one reads the same eBook more than once. I much prefer pBooks.