A question about identifying clean, SEO and page speed optimized code

Hey everyone, my wife and I run a surf travel and lifestyle website called Lush Palm. We’re in the process of switching themes and integrating WooCommerce so we can start selling our own products and scale our business.

My wife and I are not very technically savvy, so we are not that familiar with the ins and outs of coding, although we know some of the basics. I’ve recently become very interested in being more proficient as an online biz owner about how everything works so I’m doing tons of research and learning about HTML, CSS, JS, all the different languages and frameworks. Etc.

So we found a new theme we really like and I was just wondering if there is a way to verify that a certain theme was written with clean, SEO and page speed optimized coding practices? Where/how would I look into this and what would I look for? Also, what makes a theme ‘lightweight’? And lastly, is the _S or underscores a solid framework for a custom theme in comparison to something that was built on Redux or Genesis?

I’ve seen people advertise on their premium themes that it was written with clean code, or proper H-tags structural hierarchy and schema.org meta markups, etc. But I don’t really know what all of this means.

Any feedback and insights would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers, Eric

Hello Eric,welcome to our community!

One method to check how a theme implements SEO and fast speed is to check them with some tools (these tools are giving a score).

For instance, if you copy-paste the link of theme preview to these tools, you will be able to see how fast and SEO oriented those themes are:

https://gtmetrix.com/ or another tool: https://tools.pingdom.com/

1 Like

Hi Hevada, thanks for the warm welcome!

Ah, yes, I’m familiar with both tools and was actually playing around with them yesterday to see how the theme scored. It did alright, not outstanding though. That being the case, I was thinking that maybe the theme wouldn’t perform as well from the preview version due to other factors like hosting, caching, and other page speed optimization tweaks that one could implement to improve load times. Is that possible?

I really like to aesthetic of the theme so I was hoping I could further optimize it to make it faster and meet my standards once running it on my own site.

What do you think?

Thanks again!

Tanto GTmetrix como o Pingdom são boas ferramentas. Mas eu acho mais interessante as Ferramentas para desenvolvedor do Google Chrome. Elas são mais precisas, nesse aspecto.