Today we’ll analyze another popular WordPress Theme: Neve.
We’ll briefly analyze how it looks, and most important: How it affects the speed of your page.
- Does it slow down WordPress? Or does it make your Site faster?
As usual, we will use our Test Site:
- We’ll measure the Page Speed with Neve installed… And without it.
In case you don’t know, in this section we talk about How we are building this Website: our SEO strategy, Plugins we use, our Traffic Results…
- You’ll find all our Posts sorted by Topic here: “Website building and SEO Diary“.
This Post will be divided into 3 different parts:
1. What does Neve Theme offer?
2. Is Neve a fast Theme? How does it affect Page Speed?
3. Our Google Analytics report for today: Users and Page Views we have.
Let’s begin:
1. What does Neve Theme offer?
Neve is a Free highly-compatible Theme that claims to be Fast and SEO friendly.
- We’ll put this claim to the test.
We have tested it with a replica of our Site (hosted locally) and we can ensure that it is compatible with the WPBakery (Visual Composer).
- They claimed that it is compatible with Page Builders so, we tested it.
Also, as many other Themes, it is Responsive and compatible with WooCommerce.
- We think that today, virtually all Themes are Responsive.
Summarizing:
- They promise High compatibility with a Fast performance.
And… How does it look?
Since it is a multipurpose Theme, it presents a a “hybrid” appearance:
- Half Sober and “professional”, half Visually attractive.
By contrast, the Twenty-Twenty Theme is much more Visually oriented:
This is the exact same Post using the Twenty-Twenty Theme.
- As you can appreciate, it doesn’t look as “serious” or “professional” as the Neve Theme.
Since its appearance would depend on your Site and, it is a free Theme, we will not go into more details.
- You can try it and, if you don’t like, uninstall it.
Now comes the interesting question:
- Is Neve as fast as they say?
2. Is Neve a fast Theme? How does it affect Page Speed?
As usual, we have tested the Page Speed of our Test Site, using the Twenty-Twenty Theme in order to have a Reference Speed.
- To do so, we use Chrome’s Lighthouse Tool, within the Inspection menu.
This Site has no Plugins installed, just one Sample Post consisting of:
- 200 Paragraphs.
- 1 Heavy Image.
Performance – Benchmark
* This Largest Contentful Paint (5.2 s) is due to the Large Image we use in the sample Post.
- We wanted to have a representative Page to test.
Opportunities – Benchmark
Then, we have Installed and Activated the Neve Theme:
Performance with Neve Theme
Opportunities with Neve Theme
We didn’t expect these results, at all: It actually improved page speed results.
- When we tried OceanWP (another “multipurpose” Theme) we were surprised by how much it slowed down WordPress.
- You can check it in our “Trying OceanWP Theme” Post.
The most significant variation is the reduction in the Largest Contentful Paint.
- From 5.2 s to 3.2 s: That is a reduction of 2 seconds.
We are surprised because, when Themes are “highly compatible”, they tend to slow down the Site.
Should you Install Neve Theme?
Yes. Definitely.
We have verified that:
- It is a Highly-Compatible Theme.
- We checked it with a replica of our Site.
- It is a Fast Theme.
- It is remarkably faster then the Twenty-Twenty theme.
3. Our Google Analytics report for today: Users and Page Views we have.
Our numbers have been stagnant for 3 weeks.
Users:
As you can see in the upper image of the Post, we have not exceeded 2,600 weekly users.
- In fact, now we have 2,500.
We hope that this November our users will increase again.
Pageviews:
We currently receive 14,884 Pageviews per month.
- Our page views have increased while our users have remained constant.
- That means we get more visits from the same users: Which is good.
As always:
Thanks for being there.
