Web Design and Digital Marketing Agency
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It’s Not The Size of The Boat – It’s The Motion In The…
As the title states – it’s not the size of the ####, it’s the motion in the ocean. After seeing the title, did you have a feeling that the last word in that sentence was going to be “ocean”? For those of you who assumed this post is going to be about something perverted — I’m ashamed that you’d seriously think you’d find content like that here on RxSEO. Get your dirty little minds out of the gutter!
I want to take up a little space in this amazing webosphere of ours, to discuss a topic that isn’t discussed often enough — the ranking benefits, user friendly approach, site speed and all of the other amazing benefits of not using WordPress plugins, having too much unnecessary code, Flash and well…. to make a relitively long story short, reducing the size of your site code.
It’s Not The Size of The Boat – It’s The Motion In The Creek
I think it was Aaron Wall whom first related link building to the fight club metaphor, by using the term:
The first rule of link building is to not talk about link building! – Aaron Wall
And well since it hasn’t been done just yet, I suppose you could now say that Gregory Smith is the first person to use the fight club metaphor: The rule of website code in terms with SERP ranking, is to not talk about site code.
Not a very good ring to it, I realize that. Though I have performed comparisons in various websites of mine, and paid close attention to the sites of my clients, for what seems like decades. What I’ve come to terms with accepting, is the fact that the more (heavy) code a website uses — the less percentage of success that website will have, when competing with much less weighted websites, in the SERP.
I don’t have any shiny case studies to prove this random search theory — what I do have is a ton of experiences on the subject, and enough knowledge to determine that this is a fact. I’m not indicating the possibility of site speed here. The website speed in my research was all up to par, yet the fact remains that websites that are heavily coded, don’t rank as well as websites that aren’t.
My personal WordPress template is a premium WordPress template. It’s designed and coded by the awesome team over at WordPress Rocket Themes and it uses the Gantry Framework. In my experiments I compared the Gantry Framework to some of the other well known WordPress Frameworks, such as Genesis, Woothemes, etc. I done this to make sure page speed and load times wasn’t a cause or effect in my experiments. What I found is listed below.
Take a Look For Yourself
Though before we delve into the methodology to my madness, here are the theme frameworks that I compared.
- Numer of theme frameworks I compared to mine: 7
- All was personally purchased – freebies doesn’t influence this testing.
- Sidebar Contained (About me, Twitter feed, Tag list) on all sites.
- 5 posts on each home page exported from an XML file.
- Genesis
- WooThemes (Canvas)
- Headway
- Catalyst (with Dynamik as the child theme)
- Pagelines
- Ultimatum
- iThemes (Builder)
Without any caching plugins being used and everything being as it should, I go over to Pingdom and run my analysis.
Below is the Framework and next to the Framework you’ll find the # of Request
Comparing Request Counts
| Framework | # of Requests |
|---|---|
| Headway | 12 |
| iThemes Builder | 15 |
| Genesis | 19 |
| Pagelines | 21 |
| Catalyst / Dynamik | 22 |
| WooThemes (Canvas) | 25 |
| Ultimatum |
Comparing Load Times
| Headway | 226 ms |
| Genesis | 964 ms |
| WooThemes (Canvas) | 992 ms |
| Catalyst (w/Dynamik) | 1.2 s |
| Ultimatum | 1.22 s |
| iThemes (Builder) | 1.26 s |
| Pagelines |
Comparing Our Page Sizes
| Framework | Page Size |
|---|---|
| iThemes (Builder) | 299 kb |
| Headway | 1.1 mb |
| Genesis | 1.1 mb |
| Catalyst (w/Dynamik) | 1.6 mb |
| WooThemes (Canvas) | 1.7 mb |
| Ultimatum | 1.8 mb |
| Pagelines | 5.2 mb |
Pingdom’s Analysis of Grade
| Framework | Pingdom Perf Grade |
|---|---|
| iThemes (Builder) | 100 |
| Headway | 98 |
| Pagelines | 96 |
| WooThemes (Canvas) | 94 |
| Ultimatum | 91 |
| Catalyst (w/Dynamik) | 90 |
| Genesis | 84 |
I have uploaded RxSEO publicly to Pingdom for you to personally be able to review and compare.
I found a more conclusive analysis of these WordPress Frameworks over on a more WordPress orriented website. Their was two different test, and I suggest that if you’re interested in buying a WordPress Template, that you do some in depth research on the Framework case studies.
Website Speed Was Confirmation in My Experiments
All of the above WordPress templates, each having minimal (as is) code, rank well in the SERP, from what I’ve seen. When I compared these sort of templates to the other, less popular ones and or those using the above themes, but having 20+ plugins — had less success in Google rankings.
The websites that I experimented with, all contained really decent on-page SEO, and all contained basically the same amount of links. After approximately six months of studying these sites and paying close attention to the website competitors, the conclusion was obvious.
Please feel free to use any of the above information to study your own website(s) — and in the future keep this article in mind when you’re wondering why your website just isn’t wanting to rank for your chosen keyword(s).
In the future I will try and perform a case study and provide you guys with much more information, to conclude my theory and prove these speculated facts. Until then, Keep in mind what I’ve mentioned here and try to do your best to use the smallest amount of code possible.
When you want to focus on your website structure, and have the urge to want to add plugins to your WordPress website, take the time to actually improve your website structure. It doesn’t take a coder to do this. All you need to do is make sure your internal linking structure is up to par. We will be talking more about internal linking structure in our NEXT post, so stay tuned to RxSEO — You won’t want to miss out on this one…