Considering using the Avada theme to power your WordPress site?<\/p>
If you\u2019re not familiar, Avada<\/a> is by far the best-selling WordPress theme of all time at ThemeForest. At the time that we\u2019re re-writing this post in July 2021, it\u2019s been purchased an astounding 704,447+ times. And over those hundreds of thousands of purchases, it\u2019s maintained an impressive 4.77-star rating out of 5 on over 24,300 reviews.<\/p> That\u2019s a lot of sites running Avada and a lot of happy customers, so the Avada WordPress theme obviously must be doing something right.<\/p> Avada comes with a huge array of demo sites, features, and options, but those aren\u2019t the main focus of our Avada theme review.<\/p> Instead, while we mention those features in passing, we\u2019re mainly focused on Avada\u2019s performance. Specifically, how fast does a website running the Avada theme load out of the box, and what might your page load times look like with a little optimization from WP Rocket?<\/p> To help you understand how Avada performs in both its default state and an optimized scenario, we will:<\/p> Before we show you the data, let\u2019s get into how we\u2019ll run the tests and what our test environment is.<\/p> First off, our test website is hosted on the cheapest $5 DigitalOcean droplet, which we’re managing using RunCloud and an all Nginx-stack.<\/p> To set up Avada itself, we imported a complete Avada demo site. Specifically, the Avada Accountant demo site<\/a>. <\/p> While the exact performance results will vary based on the specific demo site that you import, the Avada Accountant demo site is a good representation of the elements that the \u201caverage\u201d Avada demo website includes, so the basic ideas should be the same across all demo sites.<\/p> In addition to the Avada theme, we also installed only the bare minimum plugins required to power the demo site. These are:<\/p> We also used Imagify to optimize the images<\/a> in our demo site using “Aggressive” compression before running any tests to make sure unoptimized images in the demo content aren\u2019t unduly swaying the results.<\/p> To gather the performance data for each page, we\u2019ll use WebPageTest<\/a> in two different configurations:<\/p> We’ll collect the following data for each test:<\/p> We will first test just the Avada demo content and the bundled plugins mentioned above.<\/p> Then, we\u2019ll install WP Rocket and re-test all the same pages<\/a>. Beyond WP Rocket\u2019s default improvements (page caching, Gzip compression, browser caching, etc.), we’ll also enable some of the other options, including:<\/p> Let’s get to the data!<\/p> In this first test, we’re testing just Avada by itself without any added <\/em>performance optimizations. We are<\/em> using Avada’s built-in optimization features, including lazy loading and file combination. We\u2019re using whatever performance features Avada enables by default when you import a full demo site.<\/p> We’ll test five core pages from our Avada demo site to better understand user experience across the whole site.<\/p>How We\u2019re Testing Avada\u2019s Performance<\/h2>
Avada WordPress Theme Review: Performance Data<\/h2>
Test #1: No WP Rocket<\/h3>
Desktop:<\/h4>