Nile Flores Media

Helping You Rock Out Your Website Like A Rockstar

You are here: Home » WordPress » Is The Swift Theme Really Swift?

Is The Swift Theme Really Swift?

By 14 Comments


I have been hearing about the word going around about the Swift Theme and if it was really that “swift”? There are a lot of themes that boast how fast they are or SEO ready. Please remember, WordPress already comes SEO ready out of the box. The plugins and tweaks done to themes add a little extra so you can customize how you want each post to be seen – giving you more control over your website.

Well, I did a comparison of several themes for speed:

Here were the results:

Theme Name Size Load Time Average Speed per KB
Swift 32.26 KB 0.63 seconds 0.02 seconds
Genesis 25.59 KB 0.89 seconds 0.03 seconds
Lifestyle 28.7 KB 0.63 seconds 0.02 seconds
Hybrid 35.08 KB 2.43 seconds 0.07 seconds
Thesis 17.56 KB 0.63 seconds 0.04 seconds
Arras Theme 51.57 KB 0.4 seconds 0.01 seconds
Thematic 41.45 KB 0.6 seconds 0.01 seconds
Atahualpa 55.13 KB 1.46 seconds 0.03 seconds

Theme demo speeds courteous of iWebTools.

So, what makes a theme slower from one versus another?

  • Coding – Is the code W3 standard? Is it glitchy? Is the coding (php, html, css) streamlined and tidy?
  • Graphics – Does the theme have a lot of graphics? Are the graphics huge?
  • How much data resources are called to a page?

Other than those factors, once the theme is in your hand, and you install plugins, graphics, and your own content, you are increasing that page load. Where you might use a theme versus another using the same exact theme, perhaps your site is slower? Or maybe you have a host that has a lot of shared clients – maybe one too many, and the server load is not that great?

Once you do something with your theme, outside factors are at play. It is not uncommon for me to give my clients major plugin diets after they have approached me about a slow website.

So, yes, the Swift theme is pretty fast, but you make your own choice if it is for you.


About Nile Flores

Nile is a 43-year old female from the greater St. Louis (Southern Illinois side) area. Nile is a mother of 1 son. She is also a web designer and developer, a graphic designer, and a public speaker, who exclusively designs and develops using WordPress. She also blogs at GoDaddy's Blog, Verpex Hosting's blog and her very personal sites, Pixelled and Nail Polish Happy.




Related posts:

No related posts.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Rarst says

    If I might ask – what hosting, test content and tool had you used for testing? Results are meaningless without knowing what was benchmarked.

    Reply

    • Nile says

      Each theme has been installed and it was tested on was my dedicated server through HostGator. The tool that tested each theme was the site speed online test at Iwebtools (the link was given in the article.)

      Reply

    • Nile says

      There are a lot of themes that boast speed. It all depends after the content, images, and plugins you install. It is one thing for the bare theme to be fast, but what the user actually does with it matters in the end.

      Reply

    • Douglas says

      Plus, if you make a theme with a poor design and options, like NicheWp, its easy to make it faster.

      Its useless to compare themes with many options and good design (like Arras, Swift, and the ones from StudioPress) with a almost HTML pure design.

      Reply

    • Nile says

      Try using W3 Total Cache. This might help with your site speed some. I just integrated it into Blondish.net and have already noticed a little faster load time.

      Reply

Trackbacks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *