Should WordPress themes be hard coded for better SEO?

[Wallander]

In the interests of making my site faster I have recently come across the suggestion of removing unwanted PHP from my WooThemes WordPress theme. The suggestion is to hard code the choices I have made in the WordPress template to reduce on database calls.

Has anyone actually done this to their WordPress theme before and seen any measurable results?

[blacey]

I have used WooThemes in the past and personally I think some of their code and their modifications are a bit overkill, sure it makes things easier for users but its not really following the way WordPress does things (Creating folders in WP-Content to put file uploads from their admin panel for example).

In general terms I think its better to hard code references to public resources (CSS Links, JavaScript links etc in header.php). For better speed increases I would suggest having links to JQuery or MooTools in header.php and any other JavaScript files should be put in footer.php just above the closing body tag.

The benefit to this is that the core JavaScript framework (JQuery or MooTools) is loaded first, the page can then render on the screen whilst the last few JS files are downloaded and put to use.

It maty be worth using WP SuperCache or similar to cache your pages and allow browser gzip compression for quicker page loading.

I think WordPress in general makes too many database calls anyway, so where possible I think its acceptable to hard code links.

[blacey]

To help measure results one way or another you could use http://loads.in to test how long it takes your page to load from different geographical locations. I think Chrome's developer tools has a similar thing as well.

If you're trying to speed up your site then I would recommend grouping images (icons etc) into an image sprite and use css background positioning to show the respective image. I found that implementing this into a theme resulted in great speed increases as you make a single HTTP request for a single image, as opposed to loading up several images on page load.

If you're not savvy enough with css image sprites I would recommend using www.spritecow.com to produce the correct background-positions for the images so you can add them into your css file.

[Wallander]

Ben, thanks for the useful follow up. I will certainly check out spitecow. Have found W3 total cache speeds up my site quite a bit, only problem is its breaks the image slider for some reason so have some looking into to do.

[blacey]

Hi Sofia,

Not a problem, glad I can offer my assistance.

What slider are you using? I might be able to solve that problem for you, I know I had to fiddle with the code of my theme a little to make total cache behave but they were minor changes.

[Wallander]

Hey Ben,

Thanks. Am using a Wootheme called Simplicity. I have just left the minify box unchecked in W3 Total Cache since this was causing the problem. The site speed seems to be ok though even with this disabled.