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.
Oxygen is very good. As in the theme builder
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.
Oxygen builder doesn't validate but it only triggers a very low amount of errors for both HTML and CSS.
Not bad!
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.
Miniva is cool. I like that it's fontless in that it uses system fonts. I'm going to be converting more sites to fontless, one less thing to download.
Did you see the Web.dev one-line layouts?
I wrote about it here
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/1-line-layouts/373949/
There are no media queries. These are bare bones layouts. They still need to be converted to a WordPress template.
The official webpage is here:
Web
https://1linelayouts.glitch.me
Video Walkthrough
https://youtu.be/qm0IfG1GyZU
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
Even better if you want to minimize the number of media queries
https://evanminto.com/blog/intrinsically-responsive-css-grid-minmax-min/
MB - thanks for that post. Sent me down the rabbit hole a bit, but motivated me to look up a number of things that have been on my list to learn about.
As spare as spare can be... but it's 5 requests and under 7KB total
https://sustywp.com/
>> https://sustywp.com/
This is a new thought for me! Until this moment it never occurred to me that bloat on a website would give it a bigger carbon footprint. I've always aimed to create lean, clean websites but my motive was to give my visitors a faster experience.
It's nice to learn that it's A Good Thing for more than one reason.
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.
>efficient monitors/paperless billing
Any chance that's referring to desktops? My laptop is consuming 15 Watts, can't see how viewing a bill for a minute is going to consume more energy than the creation/purchase/delivery of the paper. The postman is probably going to consume that amount of energy lumping the letter to your house in food energy, and more energy if he's driving.
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/
>but this gives some idea
Hadn't considered spam filtering, good point. Think the calculations may need updated wrt more spam, more efficient hardware, more efficient software networking with epoll etc and probably a more hefty sized spam filter. gmail's web ui is also a fairly heavy page.
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.
>>Slightly Off Topic ...
In the best of traditions...
>eBook vs Paperbooks (pBooks).
Well, there's no question that if you walk to the library and borrow your books, that's going to be the hands down winner. And there is nothing that can replace the smell of three-hundred-year-old library books :-)
But if all you care about is carbon footprint and you're comparing buying paper books vs Kindle or iPad, the e-readers will win after 18-23 books. And that doesn't count if you are buying a book from Amazon and having is shipped to you on a UPS truck in a disposable envelope.
https://slate.com/technology/2010/08/are-ipads-and-kindles-better-for-the-environment-than-books.html
https://gowageningen.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/co2-footprints-of-kindle-vs-ipad-vs-books.pdf
Quote from: ukgimp on June 23, 2020, 06:15:15 AM
Oxygen is very good. As in the theme builder
Have you used it personally? Or just people you collaborate with?
I've been playing around with a demo and it's pretty dizzying. It's like a whole new ecosystem and mentality. My impression is that if you really know Oxygen well, you would be super productive and the code it turns out seems to be pretty reasonable in general. But getting up to speed with it might take a long time and I'm not sure I want to invest that time.
Thoughts?
Just FYI, I demoed Oxygen. It's a whole other way of doing things. On the one hand, it's amazing. On the other it's intimidating. Once you wrap your head around it, you can do things quite quickly, but I decided I'm more comfortable with traditional themes.
Among other things, with a traditional theme, I make my key changes in themes and plugins, which means they are in version control. There's probably a way to export Oxygen settings and do version control.
Currently, I'm mostly working with Generatepress. Two sites in the last few months with GP and about to do another one. It's quite fast unless you start adding things to slow it down. I hear Astra is also very fast, but I have not tested it and in most tests I saw, Generatepress ended up faster and lighter, and they have a much more attractive pricing model on their premium version.