Which Blogging Website theme loads the fastest?

[mikepcservice]

Hey guys, I would like to build a new blogging website for Affiliate Marketing, I would like to have a site like this one, I love it's, layout, aesthetics and most of all site speed which loads in around half a second:

Celebrations

Make time to celebrate throughout the year with your family and friends. From holidays to birthdays to parties, don't miss these fun ideas for celebrating.

www.thespruce.com

In my experience, all the sites I have build loaded in under one second initially but after adding content and even with webp images, the sites speed generally went closer to 2 seconds. I had written to The Spruce to ask them if they can tell me which platform/theme they have so I can try to get it but no response.

I would prefer a Wordpress theme will get me like The Spruce, have built sites from scratch with Generate Press and Kadence but got the problem mentioned above. So any thoughts/recommendations please guys?

 

[Conor Treacy]

You can use tools like "builtwith.com" to do a sneak peak behind the curtain on some websites. It's usually fairly accurate about what it finds; https://builtwith.com/?https://www.thespruce.com/celebrations-4163111

From the looks of things, the site itself may be used via a CMS like wordpress, but what's presented is HTML.

The moment you bring WordPress into the equation, you're going to lose some speed. Extra javascript being loaded, everything has to pull from the database, then database lookups to find where images are located, and then build out the page for presentation.

For ultimate speed, build your site in wordpress, then export to HTML and use the HTML as your front facing for the website. You'll eliminate all the Database requests and that's going to give you an instant boost.

There are various plugins available that will do the export for you. Or, if you really don't need WordPress, build out your intinial pages, save as HTML, strip the inside content so you have a blank template, and then use that for building HTML pages.

 

[mikepcservice]

Wow NICE! Thank you very much! Been a while Conor, how've you been?

So since all of my sites have been fully built on WP and have been on the net for years, can I still export them to and use HTML or would this option work only for when building 'new' sites please?

 

[Conor Treacy]

Life has been treating me well thank you. We've now shifted to full time travelers. I'll drop an update on the General Chat here in a while. Hope all is well on your end!

As far as the existing WordPress sites, you can convert at any time. Using the plugins, just install them, and they'll pull the latest copy. Essentially, any time you make an update to the site, you'll re-run the export so that it dumps a copy out to the HTML version for you.

Another tool that I have used for years is Win HTTrack Website Copier - HTTrack Website Copier - Free Software Offline Browser (GNU GPL)
This is especially handy when we convert a users sites from something else into WordPress. We pull an entire copy of their site, all images, CSS, pages, everything. Store that in a folder on our computers, and should we ever need to refer to something that was on the old site and not on the new one, we have a full copy to go to and extract an image or PDF if needed.

 

[mikepcservice]

Those are super tools, thank you very much! I will let you know how I fare with the conversion.

Great to hear all has been going well for you.