Summary: The7 theme JavaScript is the main speed obstacle. Second, is the type of image files used to create the animation (PNGs). Third, the animation plugins (slider) is slowing down the site. These elements cannot be improved or changed.

It’s a miracle this theme loads in under 4 seconds (sometimes 3) with all of these obstacles stacked against.

The client wrote:

To make a long story short, the job was to improve the look of the website and improve the speed to 2 seconds or less.  When he started the site was loading close to 3 seconds and as you can see it got worse to about 4 seconds. I believe it was $680.00 through a “developer” in India.

The theme “The7” cost $59 $29. The visual composer (drag-and-drop) is built-in for maximum customization. It’s “feature-rich” – meaning the theme authors from the Ukraine included the kitchen sink to appeal to everyone. Multipurpose usually means slow. The7 has been sold 219,000 times. It’s popular. Popular means “slow.” That is because people are attracted to themes that look pretty and have bells and whistles. But learning how to use The7 is probably as complex as a new computer operating system.

Million dollars worth of The7 theme have been sold to happy(?) customers. In the Ukraine, that’s a lot of money.

One single javascript file for this theme feature is 403k minimized. A heavy load. There is about 1M of javascript total associated with the theme (before being gzip compressed). This cannot be improved.

This is typical: 50 percent code weight and 50 percent image weight.

The goal is to balance aesthetics (branding) and speed (load time). Anytime, you increase one you decrease the other. Push and pull. More decoration slows down a site. Less speeds it up.

There are two types of aesthetic design: classic and expressive.

“The7” site leans toward expressive because of the colors, animation, and image usage. Image usage includes PNG transparency and large background images (layering effects). If too much expressive aesthetic is used, then the page gets visually noisy – and heavy. It distracts from the content (text). The goal is to get people to read – or click a response button.

Classic aesthetic is static, clean, and usually stark white. Sometimes referred to as minimalist. But it has it’s roots in Greek and Bauhaus design theories with white space usage, invisible grids, and golden-aspect ratios.

If a page is too classic, it gets boring and repetitive. If it is too expressive, it turns into distracting noise. A balance has to be found again for wisdom. How “good is good enough” is subjective and biased by opinion and perception.

It’s amazing The7 theme loads in 4 seconds with all the expressive design elements. 4 seconds is a typical load time for a WordPress theme that doesn’t have many images on the page — and no animation. But the Internet average load time is about 8 seconds. Which has been proven practically intolerable for users. The saving grace is the pages aren’t completely blank for 8 seconds. If it is blank, the site will most definitely be abandoned.

At this point, to get better speed, you’d have to throw money at the theme problem – or redesign. You’d have to sacrifice some expressive aesthetics – especially the animation. All for a few seconds of speed.

The prospects of trimming 2 seconds aren’t good. The image assets are heavy and require JavaScript to be loaded. WordPress image compression was recently changed from 90 to 82. That is good enough.

There are other things that can’t be changed: Fontawesome is included. It loads even if it isn’t used. SliderRevolution plugin is loaded on every page – even if there isn’t a slider present. Dashicons are loaded for every page. Various Google fonts are loaded. While all of these things can be removed with code modifications, they are part of the design and the site wouldn’t look the same – it may even break.

I followed this guide exactly but it only made a tiny improvement:  http://www.onlinemediamasters.com/w3-total-cache-settings/

We’ve never had any success with W3 Total Cache plugin. So you aren’t the Lone Ranger. In general, if the site is already as optimized as it can get, caching just doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t matter what caching plugin you use.

Be sure to completely uninstall any plugins associated with those old CDNs.

Cloudflare CDN also failed in our speed testing. Same story as caching. Once a site is optimized, CDNs can’t help. Instead, they frequently slow down pages or cause “page not found” errors. It’s our opinion that CDN mainly helps with security and not speed. But if you have a grossly bloated website, CDN makes a difference. Or if you are selling to an international market (which you aren’t).

CDN and caching are band-aids for sloppy designers. Too lazy to optimize.

There isn’t anything we can add that would significantly improve the speed. We do believe W3 Total Cache is minifying your CSS and JS files. It’s also Gzip compressing all files. So you are getting some benefit from it. Those features could be added with other plugins – but there wouldn’t be a speed increase to remove the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Contact Form 7 is a heavy plugin. But changing it to something lighter won’t be significant. We’d leave it alone.

Conclusion: We suggest your website is good-enough to communicate for marketing purposes. Review the main goal of your site. Redesign should be postponed as long as possible.

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