Remember my post about a decade-old WordPress site and its stellar performance? Here’s the second part! Can a brand-new site built with a commercial theme outperform the old one?

Statistically, it’s a tight race, but the new site comes remarkably close. When starting a new project, my preference truly depends on the project’s scope, budget, and long-term goals. I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. As a developer, my job is to recommend the best path forward for a client, which is why not every site can or should be custom-made.

With that said, let’s look beyond the bare stats and compare the two setups.

OLD SITE

• A custom-made theme with just 3 plugins.
• No caching, CDN, or any other performance-boosting tools.

NEW SITE

• A commercial theme with adjustments in a child theme.
• The Elementor page builder.
• A total of 11 plugins! 😲
• And my least favorite 👎, Slider Revolution, sitting above the fold.

To achieve the best possible results, I implemented a comprehensive list of optimizations:

• Disabled block editor styles and heartbeat on the frontend
• Reduced the heartbeat frequency
• Removed version query strings and all WordPress emoji/oEmbed scripts
• Added Cache-Control headers
• Disabled self-pingbacks and the capital_P_dangit function
• Modified wp_speculation_rules_configuration
•  Limited WordPress post revisions
• Offloaded over 10 stylesheets and dequeued multiple unused assets
• And of course, a caching plugin and CDN are now in use 😊

Considering that the commercial theme’s demo site achieved only a 48/37 mobile/desktop performance score, and even some top WordPress agencies’ projects don’t come close to the score achieved here, this is a premium result and a job well done.

The key takeaway is this: When you do things right, you can achieve excellent performance whether you’re using Elementor, Gutenberg, WPBakery or anything else.

The bad reputation of commercial themes isn’t entirely deserved. In my opinion, what’s worse are the empty promises of getting “100% out of the box” 😂 or having blind trust in a company that is simply building a mere presentational website like this one.

What do you think? Do commercial themes get a bad rap?