 I'm going to do a bit of a rundown of some popular WordPress themes, some positives and negatives there. Some of the most popular ones at the moment, look, we don't have time to go through everything and I've probably missed a few as well, but I sort of approached it from the point of view that most people will be running some type of page builder now, whether or not that's Elementor or VivaBuilder on what we were sort of discussing last week. I sort of went to compare them and sort of to see what the fastest was. So I did have a controlled sort of experiment where I loaded in a few different options and I went either for the Hello theme which is the Elementor new theme that's just out through Astra, through Generate Press, the page builder framework and although I didn't analyze Genesis the same way, I chucked it in there as well because it's something that I've used in my agency for 10 years. One thing I didn't do is review any of this rubbish. They are multi-purpose themes and they're not really going to solve anything for you. They may look good, the B theme right, 450 pre-built templates or using like three plugins to make them look good. Visual content is never going to fit into any of those templates so it's really not worth bothering about any of this. I did notice there that the Jupiter X theme has been updated to use Elementor now. So I thought that was interesting but the rest of them are pretty much using this Enfold has its own theme builder, Flatsim has its own, Avada is using Visual Composer. I went into plugins and Visual Composer and stuff last month so I'll upload those slides for you. But yes lots of pre-bundled plugins, Revolution Slider and things like that. I think that's a gif. Briefly touching on that if you turn off Visual Composer this is what your site will look like. So just a bunch of short code rubbish. I think that was actually Divi code but it's very much the same. So just don't. So what themes do we look at? We looked at the Hello theme. So this is Elementor's theme. They say it's the fastest WordPress theme ever created. I'm not sure if it is but all my tests said that it wasn't. But it's a free theme and it's good for landing pages and it's very bare bones. It won't give you many options whatsoever but good for things like landing pages or if you are just using Elementor. Really depends on your use case. Then looked at Astra which is built by Brainstorm Force, a company out of India. They have a free and a pro version of that. They also have a few other functions that we'll go into. Generic Prius. It seemed to stem out of a cleaner version of Genesis. It's now come on a lot. There's a lot of different options. I haven't personally used it only for this test but Edmund looked like you were using it. Have you been using this for a few years already? We have the premium variant which comes with more options especially for Google comments on customizations. So it's also like weight, like body cancels over there. So I recommend this one. There's also a page builder framework which has been out for about a year or two and specifically built for page builders and was the fastest out of all that I tested. But I haven't really built anything with it just for the tests. And what I use in my agency is Genesis by Studio Press which is now owned by WP Engine. Their themes kind of came about probably in the 2009 plus when things were built mainly with widgets. They had a lot of turnkey solutions mainly focused in the blogging area rather than business sites. But all their themes are pretty much Gutenberg compatible now so they're moving away from widgets into Gutenberg. So it can be a good way to get started. Otherwise they have a very clean site to get started off as well. So we'll kind of go through each one a little bit and let you know what it looks like. This is the Hello Theme. It was released in May this year. It's free from the WordPress repository. Has no headers or footers. Everything's built with Elementor so you'd have to use Elementor Pro to have that functionality or use something like Beaver Builder, Beaver Thema. It's no mega framework or anything like that. There's no features and there's no integrations. There's nothing in the customizer. It's just a blank canvas. So if you pull it out of the box and install it, it's going to look like this. Which is a little misleading when you look at the screenshots that they have. So you have pretty much nothing, an aesthetic page. You just need to build everything with CSS or something yourself. This is the Blog Archive View. So no styling there either. Head of two tags for here. Head of one for archives. No metadata so you'll see there's no comments, there's no dates or anything like that. They could obviously be done with Action Hooks. But out of the box there's nothing there. This is a single post view which is pretty underwhelming as well. It has some basic comment status but not really that much there either. Very bare bones. It does run an H1 tag which is good so all the semantics are there but not much metadata. It has some basic WooCommerce but if you look at it because there's no options that's the default WooCommerce settings and colors. So you then have to dig in and customize that. So in the customizer you pretty much have no settings besides the normal WooCommerce WordPress ones. So identity, menus, home page settings and additional CSS. So definitely something to use with Elementor and obviously that's what they want you to do. Astro was the next one we checked out. They have a free and a pro version. Down in the repository headers and footers can be built using the theme as well. And it has a child theme generator. So if you go on to somewhere on there there's a link under starter sites I think. You go in there you can type in a bit of information and it would zip up a child theme for you with all your details on it. So it's good because sometimes renaming all those files can be a bit of a problem. It saves you a bit of time so it generates you a child theme. This is what it looks out of the box. So as you can see there's already a little bit of style. Not great style but at least you can see that there's a defined header, content section and sidebar. I mean not many people are using sidebars anymore but that's the default look. And it has metadata so you have to leave a comment of you know who it's by. So it's a little bit more in depth there. This is the single post view so again it has the comments that have styled a little bit as well so you don't have to worry about that. As an indifference here you can see that if you have customised everything to blue then it at least lines up. I think maybe this is the one pixel out but all your colours are going to come through as well or the tabs are not the default ones so it does bring through your styling. Everything again built in the customiser so there's more options for Astro Pro like there is on most of the themes nowadays, layout settings, colours and backgrounds and things. So that's all customised through there. One of the strengths they have and GenericPress has as well is the ready to import website. So turnkey websites that are either built on Elementor, BeaverBuilder, Gutenberg or Breezy. So you can download some of those. Some of those will be agency level, some of them will be free. This one we looked at was GenericPress and look I haven't used this that much. Just for testing there's a free and premium version. It's performance focused there is a theme library as well, a site library there which you can download some created by Tom Osborne which is a pretty good guy in the community. So out of the box it's very similar look to Genesis and a little bit similar to Astro as well so it has a clear navigation and then the sidebar look as well. All the options here are then based in the customiser so you can go and change a lot of those settings there. One thing it does as well and this is for the premium version you can go through and activate these settings so Astra has this setting as well so you can turn things on or off depending on what you need. So if you wanted to run some hooks you can run that through this element here if you wanted to change the copyright you can activate those settings in there and make those changes. So if you were wanting to run some hooks it can be done through here as well so you can either execute some PHP personally I wouldn't I'd do that in the functions.php file as mentioned before but it's an option anyway and then it has some layout options so you can do the format of posts which I'm not sure too many people use but when Tumblr was big WordPress decided to bring it through and then there's some options fsi bar and footer widgets as well again very sort of blog focused and there's a theme layout library so it really depends on what you need there you can import any of those. Page builder okay I only went in through slightly it's a modern page builder showcase and WordPress so made for page builders only and it's pretty fast so it does have a child theme generator so like what I was saying before you can put your theme name in and theme description your version your author and it will populate all your files from there so you can just if you have a screenshot and download that so similar to Astra which makes things as a developer a lot easier again all the options here in the customizer pretty standard things there has a header has a footer section and some widgets as well and you can change the options customizer layout colors and things like that it has one good menu as well which is performance settings so if you do want a global full width template settings so you are using a page builder and you want every page to be full width it's just a little checkbox if you then want to remove the page title from this page it's a little checkbox and most of these settings are now bundled into your performance optimization plugins like if you're using WP rocket or something like that but it's nice that it will clean up some of that rubbish that you don't need necessarily the feed links if you're not running RSS and embeds and emojis if you're not running that so it's a little good thing it also has your white label access as well if you're a developer and you don't want people to know that you're running that theme that can be your company's theme briefly on Genesis which is what we have used for just on 10 years now it's a highly customizable child theme designs previously with widgets now with Gutenberg recommended by Yoast, Matt Karts, Matt Malangwerg and some of the other big players in the market as well it's also had it's all of its security code or all of its code reviewed by Mark Jackweth as well who is a big security expert so it's a lightweight coding it has a really big community as well has a big following so there's a lot of people doing some good stuff in that space very heavily relied on hooks and filters as well and the changes that they're making for version 3 plus a really good so a really simple breakdown is that it's built sort of from an SEO perspective up and it's not going to really let you do anything it's got a good community behind it that you can contribute back to so out of the box is what the front end looks like now and that's all built with Gutenberg so there's a sample theme on github that you can download options now so this is where the options used to be they're now rolled into customizer but very similar options as well all updates and things very rarely break anything but yeah it's quite a robust theme out of the box these are your different child theme options so these aren't included in some type of pro plan or I think it is a $500 plan and you get access to all their themes if you're a WP engine customer you get access to all this as well since they bought them out you can just go and roll any of these themes in but they're all very widget based so if you do want to run a page builder with it so they have Gutenberg and WooCommerce support but if you do want to run a page builder with it you can run this Genesis Downbuster named because of the Beaver Builder integration but it just makes all your pages full width basically the community so it has a really active Genesis WP Slack community which is an unlimited account because WP Engine are paying for it so there's history that goes back a fair while and there are lots of different channels for development as well so right so for the testing that I did we tested both the free and the pro versions we tested different capabilities we tested the page size and the requests and we tried to match apples to apples as much as we could except for the Genesis one that one's a little bit different the test environment was a Cloudways VPS DNS via Cloudflare but I didn't bother using any caching so all that was turned off latest WordPress and then we disabled pretty much everything that we could even includes of additional pages and blog posts and things we just turned all that off what did we test so we ran some tests so header and footer without content so basically a simple page with no content we then ran header and footer with some content and then header and footer with a theme builder so those are the options that we ran I've got one lot of results here which is the header and footer with a theme builder and then the it's a demo Elementor version so we just downloaded a template check that into each of them and then tested them and the results we have here so this is pretty much the theme with a few different options turned on so the hello theme ran a little bit a little bit longer than I thought it would 2.1 seconds considering it really doesn't have any options whatsoever 62 requests so an additional request from there Astro came out pretty standard a little bit page size a little bit more generate press came in in sort of second place in terms of load time and page builder framework came in as the quickest out of them all but realistically if you're if you're looking at them all they're all really good results I mean under two seconds for a three and a half megabyte page is pretty good anyway 62 61 requests so to be honest when I saw most of these results and the ones with no comment no content at all very similar as well so to be honest if you picked any of these themes you're at a good start anyway it really depends whether or not you want options in terms of the hello you sort of just want to use a page builder or if you want a few more options in Astro generate press and and page builder framework prices are all very similar as well around sort of $50 for the pro versions because I didn't run any other tests I would just run that one before so yeah a little bit slower for for a live site but obviously it had just one option there and that's just running from their demo server so 4.6 seconds is a little bit slow for a 460 kilobyte site but any 39 requests so it's not an apples for apples comparison there but a sort of good test anyway so in conclusion like I was saying they're pretty much all good except for anything from theme forest astro and Genesis and my favorites just because I've worked with them a lot more but page builder framework was a little bit surprising in terms of the speed that it had really depends whether or not you're building landing pages customized sites with it with all sort of we're just landing pages so stick with one don't try them all out and then just go with that because the difference is a really really minimal and that's it really so I didn't really go into any e-commerce functionality in this the e-commerce functionality in flat sums okay but generally speaking if you're just talking about building a site that these themes are okay there's this whole bunch of complexities evolve with e-commerce so I didn't really look at it here our flat sums and okay theme yeah they're all we commerce compatible it depends though because they're all white label themes so they're pretty much blank so if you download that theme you're not going to get a lot of style you'll get the default WordPress or would commerce look you then have to customize it yourself whereas something like flat some has a template already so that's a difference no so you do something like elementary or be the builder on top of it yeah your speed yeah your speed and requests will come down yeah they've got their own builder it's not exactly visual composer but it's similar in terms of how it builds in short codes out of the box it looks quite good for an e-commerce site it loads okay as well but yeah I mean I didn't really go with e-commerce for this talk it was more just you know a straight theme out of the box mainly for using page builders no that was something else that was on the list I ran out of time for testing them all but yeah there's that but I haven't tried that one yet just in terms of options so that the element or hello theme really gives you no option for your header so you have to use Elementor Pro to build the header and the footer yeah in terms of performance between them very negligible it really depends on the features that you want from that base theme if you're happy to build everything in a page builder then the hello theme works fine if you want a few options to customize your colors and your fonts and things then some like Astra generate press or page builder framework gives you those options otherwise you have to do it in Elementor or in your CSS you're talking about like microseconds that the difference between them all so your dependencies around your scripts and what you add into your page builders where you're gonna slow it down image sizes and things like that you're not really going to save that much between each of these different options cool all right