We’ve done our absolute upmost to make Atelier as quick & efficient as possible out of the box. We guarantee you’ll be incredibly impressed with the speed as standard, but we know that squeezing as much performance out of your site as possible is a very key factor. That’s why we’ve added built-in performance options, that you can enable with a single click.
Swift SmartScript & Pre-minfied scripts + styles
If you navigate to Theme Options > Performance Options (Under General), you will then find the included performance options in the theme.
The Swift SmartScript option is a unique technology which we have developed in order to make your pages load faster. By default, all plugin scripts will load on each page, no matter if they are needed or not. With Swift SmartScript, everytime you save a page, it checks the page content and updates the page meta based on the content – if a plugin is not used, then it’s scripts & styles are removed from loading. In our tests this has reduced the number of styles & scripts loading on the page a huge percentage. This will be very very crucial in achieving maximum page speed ratings.
There are two options for loading pre-minified scripts & styles. Enabling these option will reduce the number of theme scripts + styles loaded, and also the file size of the scripts.
Note: if you have made any changes to the CSS/JS files included with the theme, then these won’t be included in the minified versions.
Further Performance Improvements
There are a few things that you can do to further increase performance, and while these may require a bit of configuration to get working 100%, they are likely worth the time it takes.
1) Caching – This involves storing cached versions of your pages & files for quicker serving. We’d recommend either WP Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache plugins. WP Super Cache is a much simpler option, whilst W3TC offers a lot more control if you are technically capable to configure it.
2) CDN – A content delivery network (CDN) comprises of multiple data centres, usually around the world, to serve content to the end-user as quick as possible. There are a large number of options that you can utilise here, but from our experience we would highly recommend CloudFlare. They offer free & premium plans, and we’ve seen great results. With the paid plans, they also offer extra tools to speed up image loading, and they also offer very good threat detection and prevention functionality.
