Optimizing WPBakery’s Impreza Theme With Smush And Hummingbird Plugins

Impreza is a well-liked WPBakery-based theme with a taste all of its personal. On this publish, a WPMU DEV member shares tips on how to optimize this multipurpose WordPress theme for high velocity and greatest efficiency.

As Phil Martin, WPMU DEV member, internet developer, and proprietor of Canadian-based internet design firm CapitalWebDesign.ca not too long ago shared with us, “there’s plenty of curiosity in optimizing WPBakery-based themes today, so I believed I’d present my 2¢ on the WPBakery-powered theme I’ve been utilizing currently, Impreza.”

Impreza is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that makes use of WPBakery.

On this publish, we’ll cowl the next:

Overview of Impreza Theme for WordPress
Testing Methodology for Optimizing Impreza Theme
Benchmark Outcomes
Making Impreza’s Efficiency Even Higher

Overview of Impreza Theme for WordPress

Impreza is a premium WordPress theme that makes use of WPBakery. It was developed and maintained by UpSolution and is presently accessible from ThemeForest, the place it ranks as considered one of their best-selling themes with over 80,000 gross sales thus far and a 4.89/5 star score from over 2,200 consumer evaluations.

Impreza is among the top-selling WordPress themes on ThemeForest.

The theme’s license usually prices $59 however typically goes on sale for $39 and comes with 12 months of help.

As Phil states: “They push huge updates each month on common. Severely, try this changelog and attempt to persuade me that isn’t one of the best changelog structure/styling you’ve seen in a very long time.”

The Impreza theme makes use of WPBakery however with their very own taste thrown in. It’s an extremely modular theme that decouples lots of the structural elements, together with:

Grid layouts: Impreza allows you to customise the way you show teams of information corresponding to posts, {custom} publish sorts like testimonials or merchandise, picture galleries, and so on. You may successfully customise any component in a grid. Try their grid structure doc web page for a glimpse.
Web page blocks: The theme gives reusable blocks. This allows you to edit every little thing in a single place and the adjustments are then mirrored all over the place you have got added the block. Use these for footers, name to actions, and so on.
Web page templates: You may construct a template utilizing WPBakery that may be utilized to any publish sort or web page. Use these to have completely different footers for posts versus pages or to help a special template primarily based on the publish sort (e.g. a cooking recipe vs a product evaluation in a weblog).
Header builder: Impreza gives a novel, energy, and really intuitive header builder. Try the header builder doc web page.

Impreza allows you to successfully customise any component in a grid.

Some extra factors to notice about Impreza:

It natively helps a lot of the ACF {custom} fields (doubly nice for those who use our SmartCrawl plugin for search engine optimisation, which additionally helps ACF).
100% appropriate with WPML language translation plugin.
Constructed-in efficiency optimization choices (together with a one-click asset optimization for WPBakery components: solely embody CSS + JS for components that exist in your pages)
Constructed-in upkeep mode, button builder, {custom} picture sizes amongst others
Capability to import particular person demo pages or copy in particular rows from particular demo pages. It is a nice high quality of life possibility: while you see a selected row in a demo that you just’d like to copy, simply copy + paste.
Every license is legitimate for 1 manufacturing website and 1 growth website (forces upkeep mode). A licensed website gives you with theme white label, demo import, one-click theme updates (with out Envato Plugin), addons/really useful plugins (e.g. Smush)
Observe: Working a license per website isn’t obligatory and you may rotate a license the place you want to set up addons or import demos. Theme updates are nonetheless accessible by means of Envato Plugin for unlicensed websites, too. Additionally, whereas your help is energetic, the theme builders will allow you to with just about any theme customization and, based on Phil who makes use of the theme extensively, their help workers are extremely educated.

So, Impreza is a superb WordPress theme to make use of, particularly for those who love utilizing WPBakery.

What we actually wish to know, nonetheless, is that this:

Do websites created with Impreza load quick and carry out effectively?
Can we make websites created with Impreza load even quicker and carry out even higher utilizing our optimization plugins Smush and Hummingbird and managed WordPress internet hosting?

For these solutions, let’s flip to Phil’s…

Testing Methodology for Optimizing the Impreza WordPress Theme

Impreza may be very performance-oriented, as evidenced by a few of the superior theme choices they supply.

Impreza provides superior theme choices to assist enhance efficiency.

To see how effectively Impreza might be made to rank on Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix, right here is Phil’s testing methodology in his personal phrases:

(Editor’s Observe: WPMU DEV members like Phil get entry to the Professional variations of our plugins routinely as a part of their WPMU DEV membership however you may comply with the identical methodology proven under utilizing the free variations of Smush and Hummingbird.)

Use an actual web site: The web site I used on this benchmark is an actual, fully-built web site. Though it’s not but dwell to public visitors, it’s operating WPML and is stuffed with actual content material together with pictures.
Hosted on WPMU DEV: A easy bronze-level server situated in Toronto, Canada. We’ll be testing FastCGI serverside caching
Smush Professional: Picture optimization is vital to this website as each weblog publish has a featured picture. This web site is prone to develop to 10,000+ weblog posts over the subsequent 5 years, so we want to verify we optimize from the beginning.
Hummingbird Professional: Take a look at to see if asset optimization works with Impreza.
Caching: We don’t want redundancy in caching options, so both Hummingbird Professional caching or serverside FastCGI caching was used.
Impreza efficiency settings: hold “http/https” within the paths to recordsdata, disable jQuery migrate script, transfer jQuery scripts to the footer, dynamically load theme JS elements, disable additional options of WPBakery Web page Builder, disable Gutenberg (block editor) CSS recordsdata, optimize JS and CSS dimension, and merge Google Fonts kinds into single CSS file.

Benchmark Outcomes

Checks had been carried out by beginning with each plugins disabled, Impreza efficiency settings off, and serverside cache disabled.

Phil then incrementally enabled one part at a time. Google PageSpeed Insights was run 3 times (common of three runs stored) and a GTmetrix efficiency report was generated.

Listed below are Phil’s take a look at outcomes:

As you may see from the above, Phil’s take a look at outcomes went from…

Earlier than (Impreza solely):

Google PSI cellular rating: 27
Google PSI desktop rating: 83
GTmetrix rating: A – 92%-94%
GTmetrix *FCP: 1.1s
GTmetrix **TTFB: 0.8s

After (Impreza + Smush + Hummingbird + CDN/Caching):

Google PSI cellular rating: 87 (222% enchancment)
Google PSI desktop rating: 96 (15.6% enchancment)
GTmetrix rating: A – 100%-95%
GTmetrix *FCP: 0.461s
GTmetrix **TTFB: 0.206s

* FCP = First Contentful Paint
** TTFB = Time To First Byte

After operating the above exams, right here is the setup that Phil discovered to carry out one of the best:

Impreza efficiency settings: ALL enabled.
Smush: ALL really useful + CDN + WebP (Professional-only options). Moreover, be sure the WPBakery Web page Builder integration is enabled within the Smush > Integrations menu. This may smush custom-sized pictures resized utilizing WPBakery’s Web page Builder editor.
Hummingbird: ALL really useful + CDN + Asset Optimization Computerized/Speedy.
Caching: EITHER Hummingbird Professional or serverside FastCGI.
Impreza + WPMU DEV internet hosting on their very own nonetheless do an excellent job out of the field. 83/100 on PageSpeed Desktop and an A grade (92%; 94%) on GTmetrix is spectacular, however clearly the 27 rating on Cellular isn’t fascinating.
Impreza’s built-in efficiency optimizations may be very efficient. It improves each Google PageSpeed scores into the 90s, which is very vital for Cellular.
Smush doesn’t seem to make a lot of a distinction to efficiency scores, however it should scale back your general web page load dimension the place pictures are current.
Hummingbird cache seems to be on-par to FastCGI serverside cache.
Hummingbird Professional CDN seems to be on-par with letting the server present CSS + JS through FastCGI caching.

Listed below are some extra worthwhile insights that Phil offered after operating the exams:

“The #1 factor that utterly ruins these scores is Google’s reCAPTCHA javascript.”
“I’m actually stunned at how effectively the theme + WPMU DEV Internet hosting w/ FastCGI serverside caching carried out. TTFB of 0.224s and 92/98 on PageSpeed Insights with out extra plugins is extremely spectacular. Smush Professional is then an additional layer of optimization on high by serving super-optimized picture recordsdata. Hummingbird Professional can calm down a bit and never have to fret about serving cache. Moderately, it might probably give attention to setting all our expiry headers, monitoring uptime and serving CSS/JS from CDN.”

Optimize Impreza with Smush and Hummingbird and you may have your cake and eat it too!

Making Impreza’s Efficiency Even Extra Imprezive

In Phil’s personal phrases:

“Having used lots of the high rating multipurpose themes prior to now (Avada, Enfold, Etalon, Further, Jupiter, Salient, and so on.) I’ve by no means had as a lot success constructing fashionable, minimalist, environment friendly and hyper-performing web sites as I’ve with Impreza. Buying and selling pre-built template and demo libraries for considerate design, intensive customizability and ridiculous efficiency is value it to me.

And look, the outcomes don’t lie: not a single take a look at dropped out of the A grade on GTmetrix.”

You don’t should be a Canadian like Phil to get all “A”s – simply set up Smush and Hummingbird… WPMU DEV’s “moose’t-have” optimization plugins.

So, there you have got it!

Impreza isn’t solely a fast-loading WordPress multi goal theme powered by the WPBakery web page builder however its efficiency might be improved utilizing Smush and Hummingbird optimization plugins with serverside internet hosting options like CDN and FastCGI enabled.

To entry our whole suite of Professional plugins, blazing-fast managed WordPress internet hosting, and knowledgeable 24×7 assist and help for all issues WordPress, grow to be a WPMU DEV member immediately with our 7-day free membership trial.

Contributors

This text was written in collaboration with:

Phil Martin –  Capital Net Design.  Phil makes use of his twenty years of internet design expertise to attain one purpose: give again to his hometown by constructing fashionable web sites for companies and nonprofits within the Canadian capital!

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Observe: We don’t settle for articles from exterior sources. WPMU DEV members, nonetheless, might contribute concepts and strategies for tutorials and articles on our weblog through the Weblog XChange.