Minimalist WordPress Theme

I’m back and happy to announce a new WordPress theme that I have created called Minimalist which you can see on this blog. Why? Because almost all WordPress themes focus on nice design and flexibility while killing performance. It looks great on the cover but then you dig in and see a lot of garbage in the source code, ridiculous amounts of database calls, a large amount of files, and plugins needed for simple stuff. Most of it is not needed.

Minimalist is simple, fast, responsive, and SEO optimized WordPress theme that can be used out of the box or as a great starting point for WP theme development. I only tweaked a few things and applied it on this blog.

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Page Performance in HTTP1 vs HTTP2

When I think about HTTP2, I think about web performance and page load times. There is a lot more to HTTP2 like server push but I am very curious about the impact on website speed. How do the webperf metrics change when a page is delivered with HTTP2 instead of HTTP1? Let’s check out a waterfall comparison via WebPageTest:
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WordPress on VPS with Nginx and PHP APC

It was time to pay the yearly fee for shared hosting and I decided to check out some VPS options. Performance was not really a problem as WordPress caching plugins do a good job but I wanted more control of the stack and VPS pricing is not that far off from shared hosting. DigitalOcean plans start at 5 dollars and you get 1 Core with 512MB Memory, 20GB SSD Disk, and 1TB of Transfer. You can setup a droplet in 1 minute and you can pay month to month. No wonder they are doing so well, it makes sense to just try them out. They also have great documentation, API, and an easy to use control panel. Here are some details on how I moved my WordPress blog from shared hosting to VPS and made it really fast with Nginx, PHP APC, and Super Cache.
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Web Performance Resources and Optimization Tools

Engineers should always care about performance. Users certainly care about speed and there are many studies that show a clear correlation between website performance and business metrics. Speed is a fundamental component of user experience and it affects everything from bounce rates to SEO and all the way down to conversion and revenue. How is your website doing in terms of page speed?
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