Before entering in the subject, its important to understand that a theme affects the presentation and visual style of your site, while plugins add all kinds of features and functionalities. That being said, let’s see how to improve the performances of your website.

In most cases, performances issues are related to third party plugins, not the theme. To make sure that your theme doesn’t have anything to do with that, we suggest you to install a website with your theme without any extra plugins to check the performances.

Regarding performances, here is some extra tips that could help go through this issue:

• Check the WordPress prerequisites here: WordPress requirements. If your website doesn’t have the prerequisites, it won’t work correctly and might slow down your website.
• Use a good host. We recommend WP Engine to host your website. A faster server with proper settings will make your website load quicker. Some hosts also offer preset caching systems that will also improve loading times.

The performances of your website can also be improved by some additional plugins:

• WP Rocket: Improving the speed of your WordPress site with caching options.
• Imagify: Shrinking your images with lowest quality loss. If your images are too big, you can understand that your pages will load more slowly.
• Imsanity: Automatically resizing huge image uploads

Of course, these are basics advises and you can always add more stuff to improve your page loading time but this is a pretty good start. In conclusion, all these steps are required to make sure to optimise the performances of your website.

The more important advise we can give you: limit the number of plugins! As you know, too many plugins will considerably slow down your page loading time. So, we advise to stick to the bare minimum! Let’s imagine that a user uses 50 plugins on his website. In this case, there is little chance that his site will work quickly, regardless of the theme used. Did you know that only two plugins (Grimlock and Kirki) are actually required to make our theme perfectly work? You can rest assured that our theme will work fine and perform better without few plugins installed.

Be aware that we continually improve the performances of our themes. For exemple, to reduce repetition in CSS, and improve powerful runtime effects like theme switching, we use variables to customize our themes.

Moreover, we developed some additional plugins (Grimlock for BuddyPress, Grimlock for the Events Calendar, etc). We didn’t choose to make all the style in the theme to keep it light. Each plugin needs his Grimlock plugin to be compatible with the theme. For exemple: if you don’t want to use BuddyPress, you don’t need the style of BuddyPress. Some theme authors include this style directly in the theme, we don’t. This would have slowed down your website, this is why we choose to work differently and include this style in a plugin. To apply the theme styles to BuddyPress, you need to install Grimlock for BuddyPress.

Note that it’s a bit more complicated than that, but we tried to explain you as clear as possible how to get started with improving your website performances.

We really hope this will help you better understand how our theme works and how you can improve your eprformances.