Comments on: Are WordPress Premium Themes Becoming Bloated With PHP Code

By: Mimi

Mimi — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 23:09:04 +0000

I’m trying to find some ‘magazine’ wordpress theme that is not bloated with lots of options, loads of scripts and LOADS of CSS – premium or not – but it’s hard.

Do you have some theme to recommend?

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:30:48 +0000

YES. I notice this is also a fairly old article but this problem is only getting worse! I have been using WordPress almost exclusively since 2006 and I find myself more frequently looking at alternatives as the code is becoming very bloated.

Having all these theme options panels and custom write panels is fine if you only want to achieve basic customisation provided in the options panel. But to fit my needs I find I cant just chop and add any more as the code has become so convoluted and complicated I have to pretty much gut a theme and re code it to fit my needs.

A good example would be any theme from elegant or woothemes. I recently customised one for a client it was fairly complex and at the end I was shocked at just how many php queries (180+) it was making and page load times were also suffering. So after gutting the theme and re-coding it removing all the theme options and unnecessary code I got it down to under 60 queries and page load was around 300% faster according to various load tests.

By: Brad Mahaffey

Brad Mahaffey — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:00:32 +0000

It’s a delicate balance you need to strike, especially if you are making public themes. You need to employ enough PHP as to allow the end-user to easily manipulate certain aspects of their site via the WP backend, while not so much that it becomes daunting and ends up causing excess load on the server.

This is where a caching system is nice also =)

By: John (Human3rror)

John (Human3rror) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:37:35 +0000

I totally agree with this statement. I’m building a few themes and I try to keep them as trim as possible.