The Quest for a Fast 3 Column Widget Enabled Wordpress Theme

If you’ve dropped in several times in the last couple of days, you noticed some major changes in the appearance of this blog. I really wanted to play around with widgets, but I didn’t want to take the time to add widgets to my old theme. So I found one I liked, customized it, and was quite content except for the fact that it took about twenty seconds longer to load than my old theme. The second widget theme is not as attractive, but it loads about ten seconds faster than the first widget theme. So it’s still significantly slower than my old handcoded theme, which didn’t look as good as the slow theme and wasn’t nearly as convenient. (Sigh.)

I really need to get some work done. That is, for paying clients. So I’ll put the old, faster theme back in place for now. Hopefully in a day or two I can come up with a better solution.

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Comments

  1. matt says:

    Adding widgets to your existing theme isn’t too hard… I don’t think. So that might be another possibility. (?) Also, could it be the widgets that are causing the increase in load time?

  2. Laura says:

    I don’t know that it’s so hard to do, it’s just that I’m swamped at work right now and was hoping for a quick fix. After all, this is just a hobby. :-)

    I don’t know if the widgets are the cause of the increase, I hope not. I’m going to try to eliminate about all of the graphics and go back to the widget themes and see if that makes a difference.

  3. Matt says:

    Heh, indeed. :)

    I have been trying to design a blog from ground up but it is so tiring! The widgets looked cool and I have messed with them a bit, I might try and integrate them into my existing blog and see how things go. Some time… ;)

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. [...] The Quest for a Fast 3 Column Widget Enabled Wordpress Theme [...]

  2. [...] The latest theme on my quest for a fast, widgetized Wordpress theme is the scrawny little blog.txt by Scott at plaintext.org. It’s minimal, all right – for example the CSS weighs in at about 300 lines while one (one!) of the CSS for the really gorgeous widgets theme I first tried topped the scales at nearly 1200 lines. And the rest of the theme is just as minimal. It contains no graphics, and even with the widets, it’s very fast loading, loading nearly a second faster than my hand-coded theme at 4.6 seconds, and at least 30 seconds faster than the other themes I tried. I think I’ll be keeping this one, even though I wanted 3 columns. [...]